Hauled in front of Congress recently, Science Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp showed signs of being open to views other than his own, which may be a first for him.
Thorp testified last Tuesday during a hearing titled “Academic Malpractice: Examining the Relationship Between Scientific Journals, the Government, and Peer Review” and hosted by the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Thorp, who is a George Washington University professor and the former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has previously suggested opposing government intervention to fight climate change is an unacceptable view.
Opposing political involvement by scientists “gives people the permission to say things like ‘climate change may be real, but I don’t think we should have government regulation to deal with it,’ which is unacceptable,” he wrote in a since-deleted tweet.
That’s a startling claim from someone who is the editor-in-chief of a family of seven academic journals. It only allows for one view on climate change: that it is occurring, is concerning, and requires government intervention to stop.
But now, the editor at least admitted that other publications erred when they were quick to dismiss the COVID-19 lab leak theory, which suggested the coronavirus came from a lab in Wuhan, China. He also said scientists in general need to be more open to other views.
Notably, Nature magazine, which quickly dismissed the lab leak theory in a paper secretly influenced by former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci and former Director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins, did not send a representative to the hearing.
“Scientists are opinionated people,” Thorp testified. “We have opinions just like everybody else. But we also know, and we could have done a lot better job at explaining this, that science is a work in progress.”
He further admitted to mistakes within the scientific community.
“And so, when we see new data, we change the way we’re thinking, and I obviously did that many times during the pandemic, and so did everybody else,” he said. “In the future, we need to do a much better job telling people that … and we need to do a much better job of helping the public understand that.”
Thorp also said: “I think the politicization of COVID … if we look back on it as something that we all probably wish we hadn’t experienced and hadn’t contributed to that to the extent that we did.”
He added that scientists played a role in that polarization.
“And I think the scientific community contributed to that sometimes, and I think politicians contributed to it as well,” Thorp said. “And it would have been nice to have had a calmer path through the whole thing. But, thankfully, science works in a way that got us to a lot of things that did work.”
It is good Thorp is showing some remorse, but there continues to be a problem among educated elites of shouting “science” as a trump card.
Policymakers and scientists would do well to remember that while the scientific process can help inform what and why something is happening, it cannot tell us what the best policy is. Rather, “science” is just one input in decision-making that also involves moral, ethical, and economic concerns.
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Common sense helps, too. For years, the American Academy of Pediatrics correctly said babies need to see faces to learn how to talk. Then it backtracked and said slapping masks on toddlers was actually safe and not harmful for development.
People will care what the “science” says when they feel the “science” cares about what they have to say. Thorp’s comments are a good first step.
Matt Lamb is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an associate editor for The College Fix and has previously worked for Students for Life of America and Turning Point USA.