What Constitutes True Science?

This summer I had the privilege of taking an internship at the National Institutes of Health. At risk of sounding cliché, it was truly a fascinating experience that redefined my opinions of scientific research. In the few weeks that I spent there, I collected many memorable experiences that I could share today. But of course, we simply do not have enough time to analyze each adventure. So I will leave you with one.

I think many young Americans have the illusion that their government is so vast and so powerful that it can simply operate on an unlimited budget. And while it sometimes seems that the government believes it has an unlimited budget, the reality is far less impressive. So before I took my first steps onto the NIH campus, I held lofty expectations at what this Garden of Eden would be like. I expected paved streets lined with gleaming research building in a celestial paradise of scientific breakthroughs.

I didn’t quite expect bare sheetrock tiles. Nonetheless, the place was far from horrible and at any time could still be transformed into the world’s largest Starbucks with little renovation. In the labs, however, was a slightly different story.

Here, the environment was much more fiscally conservative. Yes, the laboratory had enough to get by, but lab technicians could not experiment indiscriminately without any consideration of cost. There was a finite budget and they had to work with it. Like a true financial microcosm, distribution of funds vested in the power of an individual – the research director. And on one humorous occasion when he heard that other laboratories were borrowing his equipment, he severed foreign aid programs to proclaim, “There is no socialism in the lab.” Unfortunately, my idea for a poster with a crossed-out Chairman Mao armed with a micropipette fell through.

Anyway, I digress. I was curious as to how funds were distributed among various labs, so I asked the research director. He explained that a central agency at the NIH reviews the scientific investigations from a laboratory to determine how valuable their contributions are and how worthy they are of the money they request.

With this comes the problem of what makes certain scientific developments more valuable than others.

If we assume that all human decisions are made with at least some element of bias, we must examine the mental maps of those who make the judgments. These people undoubtedly already have pictures of reality that includes ideas of truth and untruth, reasonable and unreasonable, right and wrong, etc. So in this case, agency workers in all likelihood, perhaps even without consciously realizing, will side with the scientific developments that fit their ideologies the best. And once this occurs, something like confirmation bias becomes rampant – they only notice evidence that supports their belief that a particular investigation is valuable or not valuable. Unconditional objectivity is thrown out the window.

But let’s say that somehow the reviewers were able to unconditional absolute objectivity. I then question if the scientists themselves can this. I say no. That there even exists an agency review admits that not all scientific investigations present pure and absolute science. Instead, most if not all paint a picture that is a blend of prior dogmatic belief, subjective primary observation, imperfect second-hand information, and inadequate justification. We are no longer left with a scientific report. We are left with an incomplete deliberation of what’s important and what’s not. And in all likelihood, how a particular scientific report is packaged using convincing or unconvincing language is bound to significantly affect those reviewing it.

And from this, we are left with the overarching knowledge issue. This is whether or not true and absolute objective science actually exists, or whether it is all influenced to some extent by the subjectivity of humans.