Do scientists lie? Let’s review the recent evidence. “I left out the full truth to get my climate change paper published,” the climatologist Patrick Brown wrote in an essay posted earlier this month, just days after his research had appeared in the journal Nature. The paper’s main finding, that global warming makes extreme wildfires more common, was based on a willful oversimplification of reality, he confessed—and it did not represent his private view that other factors are as or more important.
Another, similar story came out in June, during the congressional inquiry into COVID’s origins: The language of a crucial, early paper ruling out the “lab-leak theory” had been altered during peer review to make its conclusions more robust, investigators found. Kristian Andersen, its lead author, admitted that the paper’s blanket dismissal of “any type of laboratory-based scenario” was added in response to comments by the journal’s editor and peer reviewers. To get a study through the publication process, he said, a scientist must on occasion “make some of the language punchier.” House Republicans used a different word to describe these events: cover-up.
Each of these revelations brought demands that the affected papers be retracted—not because they contained fraudulent data or false facts but rather on the grounds that their authors had been hiding doubts about their own conclusions. (Neither paper has been taken down, though the editor in chief of Nature did call out Brown’s “poor research practices” and say that the journal is “carefully considering the implications of his stated actions.”) Researchers tend to get into trouble when their published numbers have been faked, or when their math is incorrect. Other matters of dubious judgment—whether pertaining to a study’s design or its interpretation—would fall under the more permissive auspices of scholarly debate. The accusations against Brown and Andersen, however, propose a novel form of misbehavior: the crime of insincerity.
This newly prominent offense aligns with the nation’s mood. In today’s skeptical environment, any outside influence on the work of scientists may be cast as covert manipulation, if not censorship. Brown publicly confessed that he held back his true feelings and distorted his research in order to get the work published in a top journal—that sort of publication is a near-requirement for academic scientists. Prestige periodicals, he claimed, demand obsequious devotion to the most alarming possible narrative about climate change. If he’s right, then peer review—once a means of making scientific work balanced and consensus-driven—now serves to stifle disagreements, and deferring to it would be a form of surrender to establishment elites. The most important aspect of an article would be whether it is heartfelt.
Every study is strategic, though. Each requires choices about how to design the analysis and explain the results. Yes, Brown made his choices with a particular conclusion in mind, one he thought would be acceptable to scientific gatekeepers. And Andersen acknowledged that he crafted his COVID-origins paper in response to the political environment of early 2020. But their stories are not exceptional. As an academic physician, I’ve contributed to papers for medical journals and fielded the demands of peer reviewers, however parochial they may be. I can’t say that I’ve always held the line on my own, sincere beliefs. I’ve toned down criticism of professional colleagues, for example, and like Andersen and Brown, I’ve hewed to the preferred phrasing of my editors. (I’ve also played the part of narrow-minded reviewer myself.)
The academic half of me feels this represents at most a minor breach of principles: getting useful data or an interesting idea into the literature is worth a few compromises around the edges. But the physician half becomes indignant at the downstream costs of insincerity. The framing of a paper helps determine how research is received and understood. Subtle choices in its assumptions, figures, and conclusion may, for instance, encourage readers to believe that the most apocalyptic predictions about climate change are inevitable, or that the lab-leak hypothesis has never been more than a conspiracy theory. Anti-vaccine ideas also gain traction in this way. By tempering their rhetoric and zooming in on discrete claims, vaccine doubters can transform a questionable ideology into a facsimile of healthy skepticism, and publish watered-down versions of their core theories in peer-reviewed medical journals.
Joseph Ladapo, the vaccine-skeptical surgeon general of Florida, has been a prominent user of this motte-and-bailey strategy. He has consistently been a vocal detractor of the COVID shots. He’s called them an “unsafe medication” and is not sure that anyone should be getting inoculated this far into the pandemic—yet when his department released a scientific analysis last year suggesting that vaccination may increase the risk of cardiac death, its conclusion was presented with the mealymouthed restraint of formal scientific inquiry: “The risk associated with mRNA vaccination should be weighed against the risk associated with COVID-19 infection,” it said, then cautioned that the results were preliminary. But shortly after putting out these data, Ladapo recommended that all men under 40 avoid the vaccine. If the language in Andersen’s paper was punched up for publication, the language in the surgeon general’s must have been punched down. (Ladapo’s office did not respond to inquiries.)
Ladapo has faced more scrutiny than some other vaccine skeptics because of his influential public post and affiliation with Governor Ron DeSantis. Numerous media outlets have run stories undermining the validity of Florida’s vaccine study, and the Tampa Bay Times obtained draft versions of the paper revealing that, prior to release, Ladapo removed results showing that COVID infection posed a greater risk of cardiac death than the vaccines did. Critics called his changes a “lie by omission.” An investigation by the University of Florida, where Ladapo is a tenured professor, accused him of violating research-integrity standards. Investigators did not allege that he had committed “research misconduct” in the classic sense. Instead, they made the squishier assertion that he had engaged in “careless and contentious research practice.”
Ladapo brushed off the criticism, saying that he had revised the paper based on his scientific expertise. He was simply making choices about how to present his research, and those choices happened to support the conclusion that would be most amenable to a specific audience. Truthfully, his behavior may be dangerous, but it is not all that unusual. A large swath of academic literature could reasonably be described as “careless and contentious.” The blowback to Ladapo’s work—and to Andersen’s and Brown’s—has more to do with ongoing political conflicts than any specific, egregious details of its presentation. Other researchers may be no less biased and no less inclined to spin their findings in order to advance their private goals. They’re just better at keeping themselves out of the spotlight.
Is scientific insincerity really a problem? Facts, as the saying goes, don’t care about our feelings; science is supposed to be the land of facts. Data are presented, discussed, confirmed, or discredited—all on their own terms. Belief has nothing to do with it, and forensically dissecting an author’s motivations has little practical value. But the public’s skepticism of science remains significant. People want to know what the research community might be keeping from them. Brown’s essay, which accused scientific journals of bias, was published by The Free Press, an outlet devoted to “stories that are ignored or misconstrued in the service of an ideological narrative.” The Free Press’s science section is awash in references to censorship, deception, and lies. Only bad news is newsworthy in some corners of the media; shady science has become a dominant narrative in its own right.
The Andersen, Brown, and Ladapo controversies suggest that scientists’ personal views—and the way they get run through the publication meat grinder—are likely to remain a source of scandal. When an unpalatable result cannot be dismissed out of hand, we turn to a simpler explanation: human nature. The science is wrong because the scientists are being insincere. It’s too easy to assume that if they’d only tell us what they really think, the facts would be on our side.
