Contact High — Architecture in Helsinki

 

A couple years ago CBC Ideas did a 24-part series called How to Think About Science (you can listen to the entire series by clicking on the link). It had some high points but it had many, many low points including interviews with people like Rupert Sheldrake–who has been good at crazy hypotheses but weak on supporting them with evidence–and some postmodern philosophers who hold that science is a social pursuit with no relation to reality (maybe I’m exaggerating that claim a bit). I actually wrote to the producer, David Cayley, to tell him it was one of the poorer portraits of science I’d ever heard. He wrote back but he seemed to think I wanted more emphasis put on the positive aspects of science but my criticism was that he wasn’t critiquing the right aspects of science.

Years later, now that I’ve been working/studying in epidemiology for only two years, though it feels longer, I have to wonder why, in a 24-part series, he couldn’t find a half-hour to talk with an epidemiologist. Epidemiology is a field fraught with problems it will have to overcome but I think its attitude toward science could be held up as a model of how to do science–at least in comparison with other fields of science I’ve been involved in.

At the 3rd Congress of Epidemiology in Montreal last week, which assembled the finest minds in epidemiology, you couldn’t find a group of people more hesitant to make bold claims about their conclusions which were always couched in assumptions and limitations. Jan Vandenbroucke had this to say:

Having just returned from the 3rd North American Congress of Epidemiology in Montreal, I started wondering whether it is epidemiologists who are most acutely aware of the tentativeness of any scientific finding. At that congress you could go from one session to the other hearing about problems of data, analysis and inference and listen to plenary lectures about wrong turns in our science. Would the same happen at, say, a congress of cardiologists? Or geneticists?

I would agree with Vandenbroucke that you aren’t likely to find that kind of awareness of the fragility of scientific results in any other field. You won’t find it in environmental science, a field which I also worked and studied in, that’s for sure, though I retain immense respect for such an important field.

Right from the start, the first speaker addressing the entire congress, brought up a paper written by John Ioannidis entitled, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” which was a scathing criticism of epidemiology. You would expect a paper of this nature to be swept under the rug but this paper, which was published over five years ago, continues to be brought up. In fact, a good number of other presentations during the course of the congress made reference to it, a constant reminder that we need to interpret our results carefully.

My favourite moment during the entire congress came when James Robins, an Albert Einstein of epidemiology in demeanor if not also in contribution, took the podium and asked whether we should get sociologists to study epidemiologists in order to find out why different people get the different answers to the same question. People collect data in different ways, analyze them using different methods and assumptions, those decisions are important and aren’t always put front and centre.

That’s what I love most about epidemiology, researchers seem to put the search for truth above all and that means a strong willingness to admit when they’re wrong. One epidemiologist got up during the question period of a talk where one of his papers was mentioned and, if memory serves correctly, called his own paper something along the lines of crazy or stupid.

Am I romanticizing this idea that epidemiologists are exceedingly humble? Of course. Epidemiologists, in my department at least, still walk around mumbling that 90% of the studies they read are bunk. They are subject to the same professional pressures such as getting grants, tenure and recognition as other fields. Some, maybe even many, continue unquestioningly practicing their science the way it was taught to them without all the uncertainty and hesitation I mentioned. But as Vandebroucke alluded to, nowhere else will you find scientists so willing–and sometimes with a perverse sense of pleasure–to admit they’re wrong. Epidemiology may be the scientific field that best embodies Carl Sagan’s famous quote:

In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,” and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.

But, then again, remember when I said medical research sucks?