I don’t deserve to be called a scientist, but maybe I’m at least a marginal scientist after spending 50 years in engineering and then medicine.
What I’ve learned about science in this half-century is that it’s not about being right, it’s about finding weaknesses in prevailing theories. His attitude is always skeptical. It’s all about uncertainty, not certainty.
Ignaz Semmelweiss (1818-1865) was a Hungarian physician who practiced medicine before the discovery of the germ theory. He is known for… washing his hands. In his day, the medical consensus was that handwashing before examining patients was unnecessary, and so Semmelweis and his fellow physicians consistently examined pregnant women with bare, unwashed hands. On another hospital floor, similar groups of pregnant women cared for midwives who washed their hands between patients. The result: postpartum deaths from infections were 18% for doctors and 6% for midwives.
When Semmelweis points this out, instead of thanking him ecstatically and immediately changing their practices, his fellow doctors cling to “settled science,” label him a denier, continue their deadly examinations, and ultimately drive Semmelweis—a true medical hero—insane. .
What theories today we take for granted but are actually wrong?
For example, President Biden has said that the only threat to the existence of humanity is climate change, and that even nuclear conflict does not pose such a danger. That sounds too safe, too certain, and certainly hyperbolic and very unscientific. It is more of an apocalyptic religious prediction. Yet if you are a climate scientist whose research results cast any doubt on this prevailing theory, you are labeled a denier just like Semmelweis, and your results will not be published, nor will you receive money for your research.
Likewise, during the COVID lockdown, doctors who suggested deviating from the government’s party line were ostracized. For example, we now know that the virus most likely came from the Wuhan lab, but we still assume that in 2020 it was anathema to the doctor who said it. So are scientists who have had differing opinions about masks or letting kids go back to school. Read about “Berrington’s Great Declaration” to see what happened to the top scientists from Stanford, Oxford, Harvard, and the like who dared to disagree, only to be proven right. Also, Sweden’s choice not to close schools and businesses now appears to have been wise.
Climate change activists in particular have created a credibility problem by pushing their claims of catastrophe so far that the only possible way out is to spend trillions and submit to an authoritarian global government because that is the only way we can be forced to change our behaviors. which they say we must do or be damned. Science is inconclusive about climate change, although activists and journalists blame it for causing every severe weather event, including extreme cold and snowstorms this winter. I’ve even heard one report that blames climate change for causing increased earthquake activity.
Anyway, we humans are much better at adapting to change than mitigating it, especially when the change will be more gradual than the alarmists lead us to believe. When temperatures range from 10 to 20 degrees from high to low in any given day, it is difficult to convince laypeople to live on less and the world’s poor to remain in subsistence poverty to prevent an overall increase of 2.5 degrees the average global temperature over the next 50 years.
We are not doing science when only certain results are acceptable. We need to return to scientific skepticism that allows opposition. Enough absolutism about what we call “science”, which is anything but real science. Let us at least consider the lesson of Semmelweiss.
(Steven Crider is a retired physician who lives in Waynesville. You can find him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
