Science Journals

One would have thought that bioethicists and technocrats would learn from the COVID debacle that coerced public health policies can easily become exploding cigars when misapplied, and indeed, ultimately harm the very community cohesion these autocrats claim to champion. But no. A new article in the prestigious Journal of Medical Ethics urges that we prepare now for more mandates to prevent epidemics due to AMRs (for antimicrobial resistance, such as bacteria evolving, rendering antibiotics less effective) and to fight climate change.

The authors identify various means of persuading the public to comply with favored public health policies. The first is simple suasion, or “normative compliance.”

From “Making the Public Protect Public Health: The Ethics of Promoting Collective Action in Emergencies” (citations omitted):

Normative compliance and moral involvement/commitment: This strategy is to convince people of the importance of assuming responsibility and acting accordingly. When congruent, the commitment of lower-level actors to comply is high. Participants with moral involvement/commitment are loyal to the aims and internalise the goals of the governing authority.

Editors of many of the world’s top scientific and medical journals are destroying or — better stated, perhaps — have destroyed the public’s trust in scientific and medical leadership because these journals can no longer be deemed objective purveyors of truth.

Nature and its associated science journals (Nature Portfolio), supposedly the most elite of the lot, are among the worst offenders. For example, in 2024 Nature endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president in part because of her support for abortion. Nature also endorsed Biden in 2020. To say the least, blatantly engaging in partisan politics is not wise for a supposedly objective science journal.

It isn’t just politics. Ideological bias can also skew what should be scientifically objective studies, in favor of desired conclusions. In 2023, climate scientist Patrick T. Brown admitted in the Free Press to having tailored a paper he had co-written, to erase proper nuance. Why? He believed that Nature would not publish a paper that did not follow “correct” climate narratives all the way down the line. Brown warned that such ideological contamination of the scientific discourse has consequences:

The biases of the editors (and the reviewers they call upon to evaluate submissions) exert a major influence on the collective output of entire fields. They select what gets published from a large pool of entries, and in doing so, they also shape how research is conducted more broadly. Savvy researchers tailor their studies to maximize the likelihood that their work is accepted. I know this because I am one of them.

Nature is supposedly the most respected science journal in the world. But its reputation is sinking because it has become so overtly political, as with its decision last summer to endorse Kamala Harris for president. Now, in the mushiest softball Q&A one can imagine, the journal is boosting an anti-Israel protester and promoting her views on Israel’s war with Hamas. What’s the science hook? Well, there isn’t one beyond the protester’s being a doctoral student at MIT. From “Why this PhD candidate joined campus protests against the Israel–Hamas war”: Jessica Metzger, a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, researches non-equilibrium statistical physics — the study of how matter, especially living matter, behaves. Metzger traces her love of scientific exploration to Read More ›