The first weeks of the second Trump administration have brought unprecedented shock and awe to science. In response, the leaders of the scientific community must cease their hand-wringing and align behind two strong approaches to dealing with the chaos: protest and candor.
I write these words as an attorney representing whistleblowers of scientific fraud. Prior to law school, I was an investigative journalist focused on this same phenomenon. Today I represent scientists and technical experts independent of whether the falsified data they have uncovered support a political agenda. Twenty years of experience investigating, exposing and, when necessary, litigating cases of scientific fraud, has, however, led me to think in terms of a different kind of politics: the politics of nonconfirmatory data. Any research-based organization – a university, a healthcare provider, a laboratory or a corporation – faces a daily challenge from data gathered by scientists within that contradict the scientific hypotheses that are bringing in the money.
Shock and awe disruptions exacerbate this problem. Too often in cases of scientific fraud, I observe a pattern of facts in which one or more experimentalists or data analysts were under severe pressure to deliver a result, while suffering from job insecurity. This can originate with the short-term nature of early career positions, or with a laboratory or institution being in a state of rapid change. Scientists do not do well facing existential job threats, because the natural pace of science is incremental. Facing setbacks in their experiments or their analysis, scientists need time to think, not reasons to hustle.
Not only individual integrity, but professional and institutional stability, are necessary for most scientists to have a fully objective response when the data they have spent thousands of hours collecting imply that it is time to start over. Most also need a minimum level of job security to feel safe speaking up about failure to reproduce the results of others who are prominent in their fields of study.
Those who hold secure positions in scientific leadership must educate the public about this issue. Abrupt disruptions may deliver the advice a politician wants in the short term, but they will also fail to deliver the products the country wants, the medical treatments it needs and effective solutions to our problems. In the long term, the economy and technological progress will stall in a country where scientists are afraid to tell the truth about their data.
Yet this message is not enough. Leaders of the scientific community must also acknowledge missteps – both their own and of their peers. In my experience, many scientists who start out critical of the claims of others but who later identify as whistleblowers, even working with a lawyer such as myself, do so reluctantly only because authors, journals and scientific institutions have failed to respond to direct, well-evidenced allegations appropriately, or have made legal threats to silence them.
Over time, denying and downplaying fraud is not only keeping my shop in business, it is producing a reserve of ammunition for those who misguidedly seek to control scientific results for political purposes. Scientific leadership must begin rolling, proactive disclosures of unaddressed issues now. They must also commit to proactively disclose new issues as they arise and before they escalate into weapons that the enemies of science can deploy against it. A whistleblower or a critic with concerns should be seen by leadership as an opportunity to stand tall and demonstrate an ability to listen and engage, not an inconvenient voice to muzzle.
Eugenie Reich attended law school after a fifteen-year career as an investigative science journalist. She now has her own whistleblower law firm in Boston, Eugenie Reich Law LLC.
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