Being a Science Critic When Science Is Imperiled
I show my love for science by criticizing it, not marching for it. But I applaud those who “Stand Up for Science” to protest Trump’s actions.
HOBOKEN, APRIL 15, 2025. I don’t march for science. That’s like waving a flag and yelling, “Yay U.S.A.!” Science is a big, powerful institution, and it doesn’t need cheerleaders any more than the U.S.A. does.
So I’ve always thought. But now that the U.S.A. is attacking science, I’m reconsidering my stance on pro-science demonstrations. Some backstory:
I began my career 40+ years ago wanting to celebrate science, to tell readers about cool stuff scientists discover and invent. I was especially eager to report on physicists’ quest for a “theory of everything” that could tell us why there’s something rather than nothing. The riddle of reality solved! Far out!
Pretty quickly I decided that science, rather than cheerleaders, needs hard-nosed critics to distinguish what’s legit from bullshit. I began writing about science more skeptically. That culminated in The End of Science, which skewers, among other endeavors, the notion of a “theory of everything.”
Philip Anderson, a Nobel laureate in physics, called my book a “good read” but scolded me for my harsh treatment of prominent scientists and fields. Anderson asserted in The London Times that I had “mischievously provided ammunition for the wave of anti-scientism we are experiencing.”
I heard the same complaint when I gave a talk on The End of Science at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency that employs physicists and engineers. Some audience members accused me of imperiling their livelihoods.
Give me a break, I replied, or words to that effect. My book addresses pure science and not the applied work you do at NSIT. And anyway, even the most positive reviews of my book reject its central thesis.
I reiterated this defense in the paperback edition of The End of Science. “Science is an immensely powerful force in our culture,” I wrote in the afterword, “much more so than postmodernism, creationism and other alleged threats. Science needs—and it can certainly withstand—informed criticism, which I humbly try to provide.”
Yeah, the End-of-Science Guy was reassuring scientists: Don’t be silly, science isn’t really ending, your jobs are safe.
Three decades later, I still examine scientific claims skeptically. I do that not for money—no one pays me to pontificate on this “free journal”—but because I enjoy it, and it makes me feel useful. I point out when I spot a gap between scientists’ hype and reality.
On this website, I’ve posted critiques of medicine as a whole, cancer care (see here, here, here and here), mental-health treatments (here, here and here), quantum interpretations, multiverse theories, chaoplexity, theories of consciousness, mathematics, theories of war, you name it.
I see myself as akin to a literary critic (which I once aspired to be). I study science, interpret it, criticize it because I love it, and because it’s humanity’s most consequential invention, for good and ill. When I teach science writing, I assure my students that I believe, I know, that scientists can discover truth, contrary to what postmodernists like Thomas Kuhn have asserted.
But postmodernists are right, I add, that science is not a purely objective enterprise. Far from it. Capitalism, militarism and other powerful cultural forces corrupt science--not to mention scientists’ desire for grants, tenure and glory. Journalists should keep these facts in mind when they report on science.
In the decades I’ve covered science, I’ve never taken seriously the possibility that it might lose its cultural, political and economic clout. But that scenario doesn’t seem so far-fetched lately.
The Trump administration “has targeted the U.S. research enterprise in numerous ways,” Scientific American reports, “including cuts to funding for the National Institutes of Health, firings at agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Science Foundation and threats to university funding over equal employment and diversity offices.”
DOGE, Musk’s Orwellian Department of Government Efficiency, has slashed funding of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is essential to American manufacturing, according to WIRED. NIST is where I spoke to anxious researchers about The End of Science almost 30 years ago.
Some scientists cheer these actions. Universities are “a welfare program” and “addicted to federal funds,” asserts oncologist Vinay Prasad. Academic science has gotten too bloated and “woke,” Prasad argues, and “a reset is needed. Even if it is painful to some, and, even if, it sometime misses.”
Sometimes misses? I respect Prasad. A cofounder of the site Sensible Medicine, he is a fearless critic of cancer overtesting and overtreatment and of shoddy healthcare research. But his loathing of DEI and other “woke” programs impairs his judgement.
Does Prasad really think Trump, Musk and Kennedy will make science and medicine more “sensible”? I agree with another Sensible Medicine writer, Leslie Bienen, that the administration, far from sensible reforms, is carrying out a “slash and burn operation.”
So should science writers resist what’s happening, and if so, how? What if my fellow journalists, like my fellow professors, fear resisting will get them fired or deported? I recently talked about this dilemma with Laura Helmuth, former editor of Scientific American (you can see our conversation here, my intro starts 20 minutes in).
Resistance can take many forms, Helmuth told me. You can report on Trump’s anti-science actions or on the “unprecedented pollution of mass media with propaganda, with disinformation, with lies.”
A science journalist can also resist, Helmuth adds, simply by describing a new scientific study, whether it’s about “a quirky animal behavior or quantum physics.” Such reporting implies: “We can understand the world. Here's how we can understand it, here's actual data, here's reality,” Helmuth says. “That's an act of resistance, to just insist on reality and to report what's true, and to explain how you know what's true.”
Yes, this is what we’ve come to: Saying there’s a real world out there discoverable by science is an act of resistance.
I still feel awkward standing up for science, but knocking science now feels like kicking it when it’s down. I admire what physicist/mathematician Peter Woit is doing at his blog Not Even Wrong. Woit teaches at Columbia, my alma mater. He has eased up on his swipes at string theory and other “not-even-wrong” ideas to report on Columbia’s craven capitulation to Trump’s attacks.
Above I compare myself to a literary critic. A question comes to mind: what does a literary critic do in an era when books are being banned and burned?
Further Reading:
Why Chomsky Called Trump and Republicans “Criminally Insane”
Scientific American and the Anti-Woke Bros
Advice to Aspiring Science Writers: Remember Marx
My friend Richard Gaylord writes: my friends at NIST were polymer scientists (they're all dead or retired now) and they did pure science, not applied work (whatever that means). this was because the head of the polymer division at NIST was originator of a major theory (polymer crystallization) and hired polymer scientists who worked on developing his theory further. note: the co-author of the theory was a major alcoholic and when his doctor told him that if he didn't stop drinking, he would die, he made a concious decision to keep drinking and sure enough, it killed him. much like the nicholas cage character in 'leaving las vegas'.