EP 387 Can You Believe in the Scientific Breakthroughs You Read About?

Daily we are bombarded with one scientific finding after another. How often have you quoted this or that finding to a friend and suggested that a change of behavior might be in order as a result? Stuart Ritchie, author of ‘Science Fictions’ suggests that you may want to curb your enthusiasm to insure that the study has not been tainted by fraud, bias, negligence or hype. Mr. Ritchie is a man of science and doesn’t fall in with the anti-science types who have loud megaphones these days on vaccines and climate change. He is concerned, however, that even science published in prestigious journals often turns out to be faulty after further review. It gives the layman much to ponder about what to believe. Aside from corporate directed science we need to be skeptical, like good scientists, that the purported findings have been as rigorously arrived at as we would have hoped.

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