Part two of a three-part series on universities, science, and the promotion of health as our social purpose.
Last week’s Healthiest Goldfish essay was the first in a series of three essays about the process of knowledge generation that is at the heart of all we do in public health. In that essay, I considered the role of universities in this process and how we can strengthen and sustain universities in a time when they are being challenged. Today, I would like to engage with another essential element of knowledge generation: science.
I have been mulling this piece ever since a fireside chat-style conversation I facilitated with John Ioannidis at the 2026 Society for Epidemiologic Research meeting. After a lengthy discussion about the shortcomings of science, I asked him why—given the severity and persistence of some of these shortcomings—bother with science at all? His answer: because it is the best thing that we can do for homo sapiens sapiens. The answer has stayed with me ever since, and this essay is, in part, an attempt to think it through. Ioannidis is the author of what may be the most-read methods paper of this century, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” and he is perhaps the field’s most famous (and at times controversial) internal critic. That the person who has done as much as anyone to expose science’s fallibility still calls it our species’ best endeavor is not a contradiction; it is, to my mind, an essential point about why science is indeed indispensable. The willingness of science to interrogate itself, to take a reasoned look at its own strengths and weaknesses, is precisely what makes it worth pursuing and defending.
So, in the spirit of this interrogation, “why science?” Why does it matter that we do it, fund it, teach it, trust it? And why science now, at a moment when science’s funding, standing, and store of the public’s trust are all contested?
A point of clarification before I tackle this. I do not address here the related, but different question of “what” is science? There is a long intellectual tradition of thinkers from Bacon to Karl Popper to Richard Feynman to Robert K. Merton and even to Vannevar Bush’s Science, the Endless Frontier who have discussed this. Fundamentally, my take is science is not a set of answers, but a discipline committed to uncovering, and communicating, truth.
Read more here