Watch the method, not the money

So 'The Constant Gardener' is coming out in Britain, with fulsome praise already oiling its path. Never mind that it is paranoid and delusional, encouraging a fundamental misunderstanding of the power of capitalist free enterprise to achieve great good. Megan Basham gives it an intelligent roasting, but expect much kowtowing before something that indulges people's worst suspicions. How horrible, to devote so much aesthetic skill (the cast is stellar and the cinematography looks fabulous) to peddling paranoid lies. A sign of a civilisation in fundamental confusion. I am reminded, however, of a wider and more dangerous trend than a rather silly conspiracy theory about Big Pharma. Like most of us, you have probably picked up the cynical reflex of looking at the funders behind a piece of scientific research and then decrying it on that basis. "The Salt Council! No wonder they found it killed slugs!" True, there is a tremendous capacity in human action for subtle biases to creep in and lead us in the direction of our self-interest. What is so dangerous in this trend is that it fundamentally misunderstands, and effectively discards, the scientific project. Science is based on the idea of an objective and replicable method. If a paper has found a result your preconceived ideas can't cope with, you must try and replicate it under ruthlessly strict and double-blind conditions. If that fails, you can rest easy. If not, you need some new ideas. So who funds the research shouldn't matter, because the method stays the same. Now it may be true that an initial paper is wrong in its claims, even when peer-reviewed, because of methodological errors. A recent analysis suggested as many as half of all papers may make unintentionally false claims. But subsequent attempts at replication or disproof by a new experiment that tests the original hypothesis in more rigorous ways will settle this one way or the other. A finding that survives peer-review, replication and a variety of experimental tests for its predictions can be considered robust, although always open to correction if a paradigm-shift provides a fresh and more complete explanation of the phenomena. But to say that the scientific findings of someone who disagrees with you can't be counted is to take the same corner as paranormal 'reseachers' who say there is a paranormal effect that prevents paranormal effects manifesting themselves under laboratory conditions. Not only can we not agree on the truth as a consequence, we can't even argue about it. Trapping the world in bubbles of false consciousness is just giving up on truth and science out of a refusal to hear results that may challenge our dearly-held assumptions. The cynics who hold this view would normally want to save that piece of derision for the religious right, but they suffer the same flaw if they will rule out truth on the basis of who funds a scientific study. After all, the only criticism you can really make in such cases is, "how dare they investigate that hypothesis!" To which the only reply is, because it might be true. Which goes to show which side is open to truth and which is trapped by dogma. The value of special interest groups funding research using universally-accepted objective methods is that questions that common prejudice thinks it can answer on instinct are forced to prove themselves. Naturally, all sides of a question should be addressed, but if funding is free and open, that should happen in a healthy marketplace. Defending ourselves against groupthink is hard work. Only asking questions when we are sure of comfortable answers won't do the trick.