The former president of Canada's largest science based regulatory agency, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, cautioned the public recently: "Don't be fooled. Science is always politicized." Ronald Doering argues in the National Post that we should not expect scientists to put aside their policy biases nor confess using their scientific credentials as participants in the policy arena:
That scientists should dress up their science advice as pure neutral science is understandable. For those with scientific expertise, it makes perfect sense to wage political battles through science because it necessarily confers to scientists a privileged position in political debate.
But, does it? Must we lower our high expectations that scientific experts can give us the "straight scoop" without injecting their personal policy preferences to bias their "scientific findings"? I think we can expect more from scientists. Dumbing down our sensibilities in considering scientific studies would result in substituting our own, non-expert biases and thwart progress in embracing new understandings of the reality of the world around us. Count us pro-science.
What can be said of the charge, then, that scientists have biases and their work can only be considered as a political statement? The scientific method is value-neutral. Every scientific study recognizes that the investigator has a "bias" in that the hypothesis to be tested is proposed because the scientist thinks it may offer explanatory value. It is the method itself that will save science from the bias towards confirming the hypothesis. The key here is to get agreement on the quality standards for performing the study and analyzing the results. Those, like Dr. Doering, so insist that we prioritize our understanding of "how policy is scientized and science is politicized" suggest that there is no consensus on standards of scientific inquiry. That's just plain wrong.
A generation ago, the late Dr. Archie Cochrane at Oxford University confronted this question: that scientists seemed to be reaching differing conclusions from the same body of evidence and he devised procedures that grew into the global "evidence-based medicine" movement currently promoted by his eponymous Cochrane Collaboration .
The critical component of evidence-based science is the rigorous separation of method and data. The method must be set out first and the data then gathered and analyzed using that method. It's the opposite of choosing the analytic method after the data have been examined to "discover" that the post-hoc hypothesis is confirmed.
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