RUTHFULLY YOURS

Scientific American, the oldest continually published magazine in the US, once prided itself on explaining science to the public through scholarly reporting, knowledgeable research and carefully crafted articles. Since its founding in 1845, it has published articles by more than 200 Nobel laureates. Yet for some time now, it has been wandering from science to politics.

A recent op-ed, titled ‘How feminism can guide climate change by action’, demonstrates how completely off the rails this once prestigious magazine has gone. To say the article is simply ‘bad science’ would not be accurate. There is no science in it at all. Here is a small sample:

‘Feminism gives us the analysis, tools and movement to create a better climate future… Climate policymaking needs to take into account the expertise that women, including indigenous and rural women, bring to bear on issues like preserving ecosystems and environmentally sustainable agriculture… We must redistribute resources away from male-dominated, environmentally harmful economic activities towards those prioritising women’s employment, regeneration and care for both people and ecosystems.’

Fans of Scientific American might have hoped that this kind of activist journalism would leave the magazine along with former editor Laura Helmuth, who finished her nearly five-year tenure in November. Instead, it appears that little has changed. Other articles published since her departure include a defence of puberty blockers (which makes the striking claim that ‘the underlying principles of trans [healthcare] could make everyone healthier’) and a first-person perspective of a Just Stop Oil campaigner’s arrest.

Under Helmuth, the magazine broke with its 175-year-old tradition of impartiality when it endorsed the candidacy of Joe Biden in 2020, followed by Kamala Harris in 2024. Fittingly, Helmuth’s resignation followed one of the most severe cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome witnessed during November’s election, which she shared with the world on Bluesky. ‘I apologise to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists’, Helmuth wrote after Trump’s re-election. She then added, for good measure:

‘Every four years I remember why I left Indiana (where I grew up) and remember why I respect the people who stayed and are trying to make it less racist and sexist. The moral arc of the universe is not going to bend itself… Solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted classmates are celebrating early results because fuck them to the Moon and back.’

Helmuth’s intemperate remarks raise several questions. First, what was she thinking? Presumably, to avoid charges of bias, you’d think the editor of a major scientific magazine would at least try to maintain a modicum of discretion in their public comments. Did she not realise that her comments might put some people off Scientific American who didn’t happen to share her politics? One also wonders what the board of Springer Nature, who own Scientific American, saw in Helmuth that led her to become just the ninth editor in the magazine’s long and storied history. It can’t have been for an impartial, objective approach.

In truth, Helmuth’s social-media rants and political endorsements are merely a symptom of the broader demise of Scientific American. It is hard to imagine now but this is the same magazine that published Albert Einstein’s generalised theory of gravitation and Nikola Tesla on the possibility of electro-static generators.

A more recent sample of the Scientific American’s work under Helmuth would find headlines such as ‘Modern mathematics confronts its white, patriarchal past’, ‘Denial of evolution is a form of white supremacy’, and a landmark takedown of Star Wars titled ‘Why the term JEDI is problematic for describing programmes that promote justice, equity, diversity and inclusion’.

Not content with publishing woke, unscientific nonsense, Scientific American has at times been little more than a mouthpiece for progressive and government orthodoxies. During the pandemic, it published multiple articles supposedly ‘debunking’ the lab-leak theory – now all but accepted by the majority of Western governments. It even trashed the Cass Review, which highlighted the lack of scientific evidence for the treatments given out to young people by Britain’s gender-identity services.

Perhaps the lowest point for Scientific American was in 2021, following the death of legendary evolutionary biologist EO Wilson. Rather than celebrate Wilson, Scientific American excoriated him over his ‘dangerous ideas’ and ‘problematic beliefs’. Helmuth presumably had no idea that Wilson, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and recipient of the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for fields not covered by the Nobel Awards), had published his ‘dangerous ideas’ and ‘problematic beliefs’ in the Scientific American over several decades.

Scientific American is far from alone in abandoning science for wokery, of course. Formerly reputable publications, such as Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet and the British Medical Journal, just to name a few, now routinely feature articles replete with ‘progressive’ agitprop.

It’s safe to say that the golden age of scientific journals is over. The fall of Scientific American proves that the old truism – that when you introduce science into politics, you are left only with politics – works just as well in the reverse. Science will struggle to recover from these attempts to politicise it.

Cory Franklin’s new book, The Covid Diaries 2020-2024: Anatomy of a Contagion As It Happened, is now available on Amazon in Kindle and book form.