Last week, my first scientific paper was published. I was overwhelmed with excitement! Joy! Accomplishment! Recognition! And then I was reminded of the achingly slow and frustratingly incremental pace of scientific progress when untangling the Gordian knot of a complex problem. My paper, though big to me, represents a minute loosening of a tiny strand within that knot. The paper examines whether …
Challenge Those Assumptions!
Happily, we live in a time where challenging dogmatic ideas about the world is not punishable by being burnt at a stake. We know the earth is spherical, that the Earth revolves around the sun, and innumerable other facts about our tiny place in this immense universe. These breakthroughs have come when thinkers push back at conventional wisdom with careful reasoning to build new …
Changing Winds in Science Funding
Bias can taint scientific research, as conclusions are sensitive to the conscious and unconscious choices scientists make in study design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation. A naive, utopian vision of science would have its practitioners completely impartial, unbiased and objective. Scientists would rely solely on the evidence to construct their conclusions about the world, without an eye towards dogma or financial gain. Of course, …