Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Dr. Nason Maani. Nason is a Lecturer in Inequalities and Global Health Policy at the University of Edinburgh’s Global Health Policy Unit, in the School of Social and Political Science, and serves as Deputy Director of the Local Health, Global Profits Research theme in the UKRI Population Health Improvement Network.

Recent governmental efforts to halt health research funding, defund government research bodies, intimidate universities with the threat of financial penalties, and the circulation of terms in research and academic papers to be “flagged” for review are concerning far beyond the disciplines directly affected, and pose a risk to the collective global enterprise of scientific discovery and knowledge development. These oppositional forces have a chilling effect on all domains of academic discourse and threaten the forward progress of all fields of study. Scholars, scientists, and their supporters must awaken to the widespread risks of these authoritarian trends and unite their efforts in resistance.

In the Lord of the Rings, Ents are mythical tree-like creatures who tend to their forests like shepherds tend flocks. They are immensely powerful, but do not meddle in the affairs of the wider world in any way, instead caring only about their own patches of trees. They speak in ways that are incomprehensible to most, and when they meet, their language is so slow in its expressions, that conversations run on for weeks. In the book, the Ents are slow to respond to large-scale devastation of their forests because of these traits, and because they each tend their own little patch.

Tolkien was an academic, and I like to think he based at least some of these traits on academic stereotypes. While there are noted efforts to increase cross-disciplinary research, to involve communities in all aspects of research design, conduct, and dissemination, and to increasingly do work that relates to society, some might argue that large swathes of us, academic conferences, funders, journals, universities, still meet this stereotype. We often speak in our own language, often with a very narrow focus on little patches of evidence, in our own specific academic communities.

In practice, this can mean that while focusing on our sometimes very specialized and niche day-to-day work (which itself is increasingly hard to juggle), we end up not realizing, just like the Ents, that the collective work we are involved in — the carrying forward of scientific knowledge in its broadest sense, the processes we rely on, and the value that society places on it – are being undermined, twisted, or broken in ways we can only see from a top down view.

In the book, the Ents eventually change tack when one strays through an area of destroyed forest, and realizes the extent, scale, and implications of this widespread damage to trees carefully tended from seed and acorn, sparking the March of the Ents, who then stamp out this destruction at its source. We find ourselves in a similar place. The recent actions by the new US administration — cancelling funding, pulling data-sets, and publishing lists of words to ensure any articles including keywords as broad as “women”, “inequity”, “socioeconomic” or “systemic” are flagged for review by National Science Foundation staff — are the latest and by far the most high-profile example of what has, in fact, been a long, multi-pronged assault on “unhelpful” or “critical” aspects of research, some of it funded by powerful commercial actors in what David Michaels referred to as “the triumph of doubt”.

Is science political?

It has always been the case that some of the most impactful and important science can challenge the status quo and therefore be politically sensitive, hard to get funded, and subject to criticism and threats. To take the example almost always introduced to any medical student, John Snow traced a cholera epidemic in Soho which led him to a contaminated water pump. As the story goes, he removed the pump handle to prevent further infections in what is considered an early example of epidemiological research. What is less well-known is that the idea that cholera might be spread by contaminated water was viewed as too unpalatable and radical, and John Snow died before this broader theory was widely supported. It is not difficult to imagine that if water companies had been large funders of epidemiological research at the time, he would have found his findings even harder to disseminate, and that if articles and research mentioning sewage were black-listed, it might never have happened.

Science itself can be slow to adapt, at times growing primarily based on what is funded or rewarded as opposed to what is needed, and is not above undue influence when it comes to conflicts of interest. The scale of tobacco industry efforts to generate false doubt regarding the links between lung cancer and smoking was possible in part because, as internal documents revealed, some scientists were prepared to take tobacco industry money to question the harms of second-hand smoke or to provide “alternative causation” theories. Coca Cola expended huge amounts of money funding physical activity researchers to help dispute the role of sugar sweetened beverage consumption as an independent driver of obesity. Other aspects of scientific research, as metaknowledge analyses have revealed, are at times flawed, redundant, or repetitive.

While much good came of the explosion of COVID-19 research in the wake of the pandemic, a large proportion was not new empiric research, but commentary and some was of questionable quality, failing to match up to the priorities of the moment. While pharmaceutical companies pay for a large portion of science in the context of randomized controlled trials in drug development, they have been found to be systematically biased towards positive outcomes. Research in this sort of commercial context has at times been found to use endpoints based on marketing goals that place products in the best possible light. There are some areas of science that might resonate better with media outlets or the general public, even if the impact and value of such work can be questionable (think of how many “is coffee good for you” news reports on research you have read). At the same time, though most of us may not realize it, important science is conducted under various pressures, commercially and critically.

Science under pressure

Perhaps the most notable example of these oppositional forces in recent years comes from the field of climate science, where researchers have faced a barrage of misinformation and other political and commercial pressures. Scientific bodies and non-profit organizations face similar pressures. It seems as if each time the World Health Organizations (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer, the authoritative body that produces monographs on evidence of carcinogens, reaches a conclusion on a particular substance, it faces a barrage of criticism from whatever industry sector produces or relies on said carcinogen, including sophisticated public relations campaigns. Of course, there is no requirement for all science to engage in these areas or debates. However, all of science loses out if the scope of our enquiry is constrained only to the research that is politically expedient and acceptable, if it becomes neutered, domesticated.

Efforts to constrain research that challenges social norms and power centers are not new. Even initiatives such as the new US administration’s move to defund the WHO has been touted for years by a range of actors with links to powerful commercial interests that would prefer the WHO to focus only on infectious diseases, and not on non-communicable diseases or the social inequalities that shape health, areas which ask awkward questions and may risk affecting the bottom line of large industries and shareholder interests.

Indeed, even in the US, one could argue that some of the most important research societally has long been underfunded, defunded, or marginalized. For example, although firearms recently became the most common cause of death and disability among children and young people in the US, exceeding road traffic accidents, research that might support social and healthcare solutions has been silenced. The US congress barred most firearms health research via the Dicky amendment not because it was not critically important, but due to the power of the gun lobby, to the detriment of evidence-based public health policy that would improve the overall health and safety of the US population.

It is safe to say that when they came for climate or firearm research, much of the wider scientific and research community did not actively push back. The latest radical developments in relation to scientific research, leadership, and funding in the US mark a substantial escalation. This could represent a fundamental shift in what research is permitted and funded, and what research is censored and starved, making large swathes of critical research, some of which was already hard to do, closer to impossible.

An academic march of the Ents?

Will this be the moment academia finally is stirred into action? Awakened to its broader social purpose, with all the nuance and diversity that entails? But with a dedication to fulfil that social purpose nonetheless? Does the global scientific community of funders, journals, learned societies, and academic institutions not bear a collective responsibility to preserve the freedom of scientific enquiry in ways that enable that purpose? Will it use its collective voice to earn the trust the public continues to place in it, or will it allow that trust to be further eroded?

The early signs suggest that there is a high risk of fragmentation and silence, however ,there are glimmers of hope in last week’s student-led Stand Up for Science demonstrations. Individual academic institutions and learned societies in the US have been largely silent, clearly frightened and uncertain. Civil servants have been left unable to attend conferences or communicate publicly about research. There have been critiques articulated that such silence damages the credibility of science generally, in addition to damaging the research on key societal areas such as inequality, marginalized groups, or the science of climate change.

If science is muzzled on the most politically pertinent issues because they are challenging to dominant political discourse, it cannot best serve its fundamental function of bearing witness to the forces that shape society. If the only elements of the scientific community that push back are those directly affected, with a silent majority preferring to tend its own patches of evidence, that risks the further biasing of research away from where society needs it most. Scholarly institutions, publishers, and funders can ill afford to turn away, hoping that censors don’t come for their little patch of trees, or that such limits are not yet the case in our own country context.

Could science emerge from this moment shaken from its slumber, to the better of all? It seems that to keep our heads down and hope for a return to “the good old days” is to be blind to the attacks that critical research is often under. Instead, we should take this as a moment to redefine the purpose of science as an instrument in the carrying forward of an ever-advancing civilization, with the greater accountability, transparency, diversity, breadth, and depth that means for us as individual scientists, institutions, funders, and publishers.