Report on Science

I have recently returned to school to pursue a Masters in Science in Soil Science from the University of British Columbia. While trying to adjust to a life that is indoors, stationary and of the mind rather than of the body, I have been struggling to understand what it means to be a graduate student and what it means to be a member of the scientific community.

I once did an art project for a class on the history and philosophy of environmental thought, where I compared the way we view western medicine (science) and the way we view Christianity (religion). The point of my project was to challenge viewers to think about, or even possibly concede, that science is as much a belief system as religion - in a way it is our modern day religion. There exists the practice where the majority of the general public put faith in the methods and practices of science in order to facilitate their adherence to the rules and results put forth by the scientific community - much the way people adhered to the Christian faith many years ago. Believing in science requires faith in the practitioners who deal with scientific methodology, processes, subjects and research on a daily basis. However, like all human creations, science is flawed because of its human component. Practitioners are only human, and they make mistakes. This realization is often disheartening for non-practitioners.

This week I learned an interesting fact about scientific publication. Perhaps part of the reason we believe that science is such a majestic entity is because the scientific community is in the habit of only publishing positive results. What this means is that though there are many research projects that turn out to be complete flops, no knowledge, methodology or results are shared from these misguided pursuits of answers. What this also means, is that the same questions can be asked again and again because there is no record that someone else has gone down the same road in another place or another time.

To counter this trend, I have also learned of the Journal of Negative Results. "The primary intention of Journal of Negative Results is to provide an online-medium to publish peer-reviewed, sound scientific work in ecology and evolutionary biology that is scientifically rigorous but does not rely upon arbitrary significance thresholds to support conclusions." (http://www.jnr-eeb.org/index.php/jnr/index Sept. 13, 2012)

The element which most surprises me is that until this moment, I had never thought about what were the biases for publication in scientific journals. Even something as simple as highlighting positive results and omitting negative results is significant.

We must ask then: Do readers prefer reading about success rather than failure even though failure is just as important as success?