13 Bias in science, by scientists
Favoring the accepted view over credible alternatives from “outside” sources
This is the fourteenth post in this series. You may want to read the Introduction titled The Myth of Scientific Uncertainty, and posts numbered 1-12 first.
A pleasure and a benefit of doing scientific research is becoming a member of a community of investigators working in the same field. Over years of attendance at professional meetings and reviewing each other’s papers and proposals, we form mutually supportive connections. “Membership” in one’s group is informal, but the people in it soon catch on to who is ‘in’ and what they are working on. These are the assumed ‘experts’ in the field and innovative ideas are not expected to come from those outside the group. This is especially true of ideas (or even data) that call to question the accepted explanations for the laws they employ.
Earlier, we saw the initial resistance to continental drift, that suggestion coming from someone outside the group. I had the same experience twice in my career. The first was the difficulty in getting funded to build a tandem mass spectrometer for automated chemical analysis. (“It couldn’t work.” “I didn’t know what I was doing.”) The second was the equilibrium partition explanation for selectivity in electrospray ionization.
In the first case, I had no publications in mass spectrometry but was known for innovative electronic instruments, and in the second case, it was my first foray into methods of ionizing samples. The reviews of submissions that were negative were broadside rejections rather than reasoned critiques of the concepts I introduced. My recognitions in related areas helped, and now I am a “member” in both areas.
Besides an in-group’s resistance to challenges of their assumptions, more personal considerations can create bias. In the early 1930s, Enrico Fermi was bombarding various elements with neutrons. The products were routinely atoms with a modest decrease in atomic weight. But with a uranium target, he claimed, from chemical analysis, to have produced a heavier, previously unknown element. In other words, he believed the bombarding neutrons were being incorporated into the uranium nucleus instead of knocking a bit off.
Ida Noddack, a German chemist and physicist, noting Fermi’s analytical method, authored a paper in the 1920s listing the much lighter elements his method could have detected instead. She was the first to suggest a major fragmentation of the nucleus, i.e., nuclear fission. His belief in nuclear stability deterred Fermi from considering this possibility. He received the Nobel Prize for his work on nuclear bombardment. Noddack, nominated four times for her breakthrough suggestion, did not.
This story is reminiscent of Watson and Crick’s use of Rosalind Franklin’s definitive X-ray data in the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Franklin was not aware that her colleague, Maurice Wilkins, had shared her data with Watson. Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize, but not Franklin.
Both these stories conjure up suspicions of gender bias which one would hope has decreased since then. But the New Scientist[1] reports that when proposals for access to time on the Hubble space telescope were made anonymous in 2017, the success rate for women-led teams more than doubled, giving them an unprecedented edge over male-led teams.
Of course, gender is not the only basis of bias. Others include ethnicity, language, academic pedigree, and prestige of institution. I believe it is largely unintentional, from having instinctively adopted the outlooks of our peers and mentors. We can only try to be more conscious.
But not everything proposed is worth pursuing. The profound and novel are mingled with the groundless and trivial as they cross reviewer’s and funder’s desks. Despite the perception that scientists are always objective, we make judgement calls like everyone else. There will be some mistaken resistance like nuclear fission and low-energy ion fragmentation, and we will follow some false positives like cold fusion for a while. But we might miss fewer innovations if we didn’t confuse current explanations with truth and if we didn’t dismiss ideas because of who had them. Please spread the word that there are some things we know for sure, and that we can logically show how we know that.
[1] New Scientist, 21 December 2018