RUTHFULLY YOURS

He might not be as brash as Elon Musk. He might not wield his sword of reform with as much gleeful abandon as Donald Trump does his. Yet Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s pick to run the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is nonetheless fighting an essential fight. His target? Scientism. The tyrannical trend whereby ‘science’, in his words, ‘stands on top of society and says “You must do this, this and this or else”’. He wants to restore science’s older, nobler goal of providing people with ‘knowledge and freedom’. Everyone who values reason should hope he succeeds.

Bhattacharya gave us a glimpse of his beliefs at his Senate confirmation hearing this week. In his humble, professorial style – anyone hoping for a rerun of RFK’s fiery confirmation hearing will have been sorely disappointed – he outlined his plans for the NIH. He wants it to be a freer, more open-minded place. For too long, he said, scientists at the NIH and elsewhere have displayed a ‘lack of tolerance for ideas that differed from theirs’. Now, under me, there’ll be ‘a culture of respect for free speech in science’, he promised.

That Bhattacharya is even heading to the NIH, never mind taking it over and shaking it up, is extraordinary. He was a target of its invective once. In 2020, he went from being a ‘low-profile researcher at Stanford University’ – in the snooty words of the Guardian this week – to being a headline-making heretic. His blasphemy? He co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which posited that ‘focussed protection’ of the elderly and vulnerable might be a better way to combat Covid-19 than the blanket shutdown of society.

The stake was readied. Insults flew. He was damned as ‘dangerous’, ‘reckless’, ‘fringe’. That last slight came from the NIH itself. Its then director, Francis Collins, fired off an email in October 2020 branding Bhattacharya and his ilk as ‘fringe epidemiologists’. Collins called for a ‘quick and devastating’ rebuttal of their dissenting declaration. That shameful cry for scientists to act like a latter-day priestly elite, to go out and issue ‘devastating’ edicts against the Barrington apostasy, is no doubt what Bhattacharya had in mind when he told the Senate that the NIH has become infected by ‘a culture of cover-up, obfuscation and a lack of tolerance’.

Now, amazingly, the heretic is taking power. The man on the ‘fringe’ is off to the beating heart of scientific endeavour: the NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, with an annual budget of more than $47 billion. The only thing being ‘devastated’, Mr Collins, is the old NIH that you and others helped to turn into a political machine. But Bhattacharya’s mission is less one of personal vengeance than of scientific restoration. He told his hearing that he wants to bring back ‘the very essence of science’ to the NIH. And what might that be? ‘Dissent’, he said.

It was music to the ears of those of us who are fans of the Scientific Revolution, of that Enlightenment-era belief that science’s role is to shatter orthodoxies – where necessary – not create new ones. Bhattacharya lamented the hyper-political role scientists came to play during Covid. Our role should have been to ‘answer basic questions that policymakers have’, he told his hearing. It should not have been to set limits to liberty. That we scientists found ourselves in the position of telling the masses they ‘shouldn’t be saying goodbye to [their] grandfather as he’s dying in a hospital’ was awful, he said. What we should have done is say ‘Here’s what the risks are’, and then let people decide whether to take them.

It shouldn’t sound radical to hear a leading scientist say we should trust ordinary people to make wise decisions about their lives – but it does. That ‘science’ was deployed during the pandemic to justify the closure of schools and hospitals and to instruct people on where they could go and what they could do was grotesque overreach, said Bhattacharya. Science is meant to be an ‘engine for knowledge and freedom’ – it should not be something that ‘stands on top of society and says “You must do this, this and this or else”’. Shorter version: science should be science, not politics. And certainly not religion.

This scourge of ‘scientism’ – as some call it – has been festering for some time. Today’s ruling classes, feeling ever-more bereft of political legitimacy and moral authority, have turned to ‘science’ to justify their policymaking. ‘The Science’, they say, ‘tells us we must do the following’, as if ‘science’ were some kind of god whispering in their ears. On everything from Covid to climate and even child-rearing, this god substitute of ‘The Science’ is marshalled to the end of instructing ordinary people on how we should behave.

‘The Science’ is to the leaders of the 21st century what the Word of God was to the priests of the 15th century. ‘The science has spoken’, say UN officials in relation to climate change, as if science were divine instruction. ‘Listen to the science’, cries that prophetess of doom, Greta Thunberg, with the same vigour that religious hotheads once cried ‘Listen to Christ’. ‘The science is irrefutable’, we’re told by climate scientists and activists. Irrefutable? As in impossible to deny or disprove? Then it’s not science – it’s faith.

This cynical mingling of science and politics is bad for both. Science finds itself prostituted to political agendas, making fresh, daring thought that bit more difficult. And politics becomes an ever-more aloof and technocratic affair, where the word of scientists counts for more than the beliefs of us plebs. In questioning this placing of science ‘on top of society’, this use of science to tell people they must do A, B and C ‘or else’, Bhattacharya might do well by both science and society.

‘Dissent is the very essence of science’, he told his hearing. He’s right. The slogan of the Royal Society when it was founded in the intellectual tumult of the Enlightenment was ‘Nullius in verba’. Rough translation: ‘Take nobody’s word for it.’ Restoring that old vision, where the role of the scientist is to search for the truth about the natural world, even where that truth unsettles society’s rulers, would be a very good thing indeed. Science should enlighten, never dictate.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy