The Independent Thinker

Technical professionals are like congressional representatives from the Midwest: they are not in the news unless they are embroiled in controversy. Instances such as climatologists allegedly skewing proof of climate change or geneticists totally falsifying proof of cloning advances hit the news with a punch like any marital philandering or financial mishandling. The most recent example of this scientific public trial comes to us from England. The Lancet is a respected medical journal that printed an article in 1998 by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. For years since its publication, Wakefield's article was used to support the idea that the childhood MMR vaccine (an inoculation against measles, mumps and rubella) caused autism. Subsequent studies failed to reproduce Wakefield's result and criticism of his methods finally lead The Lancet to retract the article this week.

However, the 11-year-old article has had plenty of time to cement itself in the public's mind. The British Health Protection Agency recently announced a 70% increase in measles cases (1,348 total) in England and Wales during the year 2008. This spike in the disease is universally blamed on the rise in unvaccinated children. It would be sensationalist to blame Dr. Wakefield alone for this rise. A public that fixated on a single study supporting the correlation should have also minded the countless subsequent studies that refuted it.

There is another dimension to this story and I think technically-trained individuals, especially those with R&D aspirations, need to be aware of it. Think, for a moment, about how your parents reacted when they caught a glimpse of your calculus homework during your last weekend home. Did you see their eyes widen in incomprehension? Did you see their flashbacks of high school or middle school or whatever level of education convinced them that math was too intimidating to pursue? We have studied topics that many people are not exposed to and that difference only grows with our years of education.

By the time you are equipped with graduate degrees and unleashed upon national laboratories, your jargon and problems and solutions may be beyond the experience of the public that you are looking to help. They will call you "doctor" and pay taxes to supply you with beakers and microscopes. In return, you will retreat from them and discover things that will change their lives in deep fundamental ways. You will announce that mass and energy are one and the same, that we are made of vibrating strings, that their genetic material is opened like a book to you. You will announce that the world they live in is rapidly heating - no, make that suddenly cooling or progressing peacefully along - or that they are altering the neurological chemistry of their toddlers to protect them from rubella.

On that day, do not look to the public to proofread your papers or fact check your sources. With great technical capacity comes great responsibility: responsibility for thorough and ethical investigations, lively scientific discourse and making damn sure your correlation is really causality.