1.The Natural Why-Quirer (story map)

2.GM corn squabble

3.Nature pulls a U-turn

4.New news on old experiments

5.Madness in the method?

A cloud of bubbles forms in deuterium-rich acetone just before collapse, in this acoustic chamber. The bubbles grow from around 10 nanometers to 1 millimeter, then implode, producing neutrons and light. Or so the "bubble-fusion" experimenters claim. Oak Ridge National Laboratory

The report reminded everybody who is anybody of the acrimonious cold-fusion debate that began in 1989 when two scientists claimed to see fusion -- again in a jar, and again at room temperature. (Although a few faithful still believe, mainline physicists consider cold fusion a scam.)

Back to the present: Before you could groan "what-for you gimme more cold con-fusion?" you read a "just between you and me" note from Science's editor explaining why the revered 'zine was publishing such, well, did he call the article claptrap or did we imagine it?

Anyway, under the Shakespearean-angst headline, "To Publish or Not To Publish," editor Donald Kennedy wrote he'd been exposed to outside pressure to reject the article, and said the journal's job was to present "interesting, potentially important science into public view after ensuring its quality as best we possibly can."

A public airing, he said, would do more to find the truth than rumors and leaks. True, but it does remind us of Nature's "let-the-reader-decide" attitude.

It may seem democratic, but it's evasive, too. Do these editors believe, or do they not believe, the science they are publishing?

To Pinch, this style of publication amounts to "dilution of claims.... It's like saying, 'Hey readers, be warned, read this with special skepticism.'"

Editor Kennedy asserts that "It goes without saying that we cannot publish papers with a guarantee that every result is right. We're not that smart." But Pinch asks if editors who add caution labels are "abdicating their responsibility to publish what they consider good science."

Science: the junkman cometh?
If it's up to people, not fancy algorithms and logical processes, to distinguish good science from junk, then maybe science is not an abstracted system of knowledge apart from the rough-and-tumble of human affairs, but rather a realm of expert, human knowledge.

"Science is all about expertise, about intimate knowledge about an area of information," says Oreskes. But that expertise can carry a price, she adds. "Scientists are very wedded to what they know, that's their expertise. They have spent a huge amount of time, so all scientists have a big vested interest in their field. That's not pejorative, it's reality."

Unfortunately, peer reviewers must be experts -- scientific disciplines are so fractured and sub-divided that generalists generally can't do the job. The situation is bound to create tension and conflict, Oreskes says, "because ... the scientists who are most qualified to judge a problem all have the biggest self-interest."

The San Andreas fault slices through two-thirds of California. The Pacific Plate has been grinding horizontally past the North American Plate for 10 million years, at about 5 centimeters a year. Land west of the fault is moving northwest relative to land to the east. USGS

Oreskes wrote about the gradual acceptance of Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift, which was scorned as heresy by U.S. geologists for half a century (see "The Rejection..." in the bibliography). Only in the 1960s did drift become accepted as a foundation of earth science (on the other side of the pond, it was accepted much faster).

To know or know not
So can science get at the truth, or must we be victimized by a post-modernist science that is as subjective, say, as comparative literature or religion? Can science get at objective reality?

The situation is not that grim, Pinch says. Although, "at the research frontiers, it may take a while for scientists to agree, eventually they do. Whether this truth will correspond to objective reality, philosophers of science have discussed this for years, but we sidestep that issue."

Although the social aspects of science remain crucial, he adds, "It's wrong to think that social aspects and reality are opposed. ... All findings in science depend on trust to some extent. Science is a community of trusted experts, so elements of the social are always there."

So what does the foregoing blather tell us about the current rhubarb over genetically modified corn in Mexico? For starters, the incident does not signify scientific malaise or a breakdown in the system, but rather the system creaking ahead in its own inimitable fashion, subject to politics, economics, public attitudes, and cranky scientists convinced of their rectitude.

"We should not be surprised by these sorts of incidents," says Pinch. "At the research frontiers it takes a while to resolve a controversy when scientists disagree, that seems pretty normal."

The only mystery, he adds, is "why people should be surprised by this. There's a community of experts in disagreement. Eventually it will resolve, and they'll reach consensus."

Can't wait for eventually? Check our bibliography.

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