Root Privileges

Science

artificial intelligence Bharatiya Janata Party blogging CERN Chandrayaan 2 climate change Covaxin COVID-19 COVID-19 pandemic Donald Trump Elon Musk Facebook fantasy fiction Gaganyaan Higgs boson India-based Neutrino Observatory Indian Council of Medical Research Indian Space Research Organisation ISRO journalism K Sivan Large Hadron Collider NASA nationalism Nobel Prizes novel coronavirus Open Access particle physics peer review Prime Minister Narendra Modi pseudoscience Quantum mechanics Science science communication science fiction science journalism science writing scientific publishing scientific research scientism social media SpaceX The Hindu The Wire Twitter

  • NCBS fracas: In defence of celebrating retractions

    Continuing from here…

    Irrespective of Arati Ramesh’s words and actions, I find every retraction worth celebrating because how hard-won retractions in general have been, in India and abroad. I don’t know how often papers coauthored by Indian scientists are retracted and how high or low that rate is compared to the international average. But I know that the quality of scientific work emerging from India is grossly disproportionate (in the negative sense) to the size of the country’s scientific workforce, which is to say most of the papers published from India, irrespective of the journal, contain low-quality science (if they contain science at all). It’s not for nothing that Retraction Watch has a category called ‘India retractions’, with 196 posts.

    Second, it’s only recently that the global scientific community’s attitude towards retractions started changing, and even now most of it is localised to the US and Europe. And even there, there is a distinction: between retractions for honest mistakes and those for dishonest mistakes. Our attitudes towards retractions for honest mistakes have been changing. Retractions for dishonest conduct, or misconduct, have in fact been harder to secure, and continue to be.

    The work of science integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik allows us a quick take: the rate at which sleuths are spotting research fraud is far higher than the rate at which journals are retracting the corresponding papers. Bik herself has often said on Twitter and in interviews how most journals editors simply don’t respond to complaints, or quash them with weak excuses and zero accountability. Between 2015 and 2019, a group of researchers identified papers that had been published in violation of the CONSORT guidelines in journals that endorsed the same guidelines, and wrote to those editors. From The Wire Science‘s report:

    … of the 58 letters sent to the editors, 32 were rejected for different reasons. The BMJ and Annals published all of those addressed to them. The Lancet accepted 80% of them. The NEJM and JAMA turned down every single letter.

    According to JAMA, the letters did not include all the details it required to challenge the reports. When the researchers pointed out that JAMA’s word limit for the letter precluded that, they never heard back from the journal.

    On the other hand, NEJM stated that the authors of reports it published were not required to abide by the CONSORT guidelines. However, NEJM itself endorses CONSORT.

    The point is that bad science is hard enough to spot, and getting stakeholders to act on them is even harder. It shouldn’t have to be, but it is. In this context, every retraction is a commendable thing – no matter how obviously warranted it is. It’s also commendable when a paper ‘destined’ for retraction is retracted sooner (than the corresponding average) because we already have some evidence that “papers that scientists couldn’t replicate are cited more”. Even if a paper in the scientific literature dies, other scientists don’t seem to be able to immediately recognise that it is dead and cite it in their own work as evidence of this or that thesis. These are called zombie citations. Retracting such papers is a step in the right direction – insufficient to prevent all sorts of problems associated with endeavours to maintain the quality of the literature, but necessary.

    As for the specific case of Arati Ramesh: she defended her group’s paper on PubPeer in two comments that offered more raw data and seemed to be founded on a conviction that the images in the paper were real, not doctored. Some commentators have said that her attitude is a sign that she didn’t know the images had been doctored while some others have said (and I tend to agree) that this defence of Ramesh is baffling considering both of her comments succeeded detailed descriptions of forgery. Members of the latter group have also said that, in effect, Ramesh tried to defend her paper until it was impossible to do so, at which point she published her controversial personal statement in which she threw one of her lab’s students under the bus.

    There are a lot of missing pieces here towards ascertaining the scope and depth of Ramesh’s culpability – given also that she is the lab’s principal investigator (PI), that she is the lab’s PI who has since started to claim that her lab doesn’t have access to the experiments’ raw data, and that the now-retracted paper says that she “conceived the experiments, performed the initial bioinformatic search for Sensei RNAs, supervised the work and wrote the manuscript”.

    [Edit, July 11, 2021, 6:28 pm: After a conversation with Priyanka Pulla, I edited the following paragraph. The previous version appears below, struck through.]

    Against this messy background, are we setting a low bar by giving Arati Ramesh brownie points for retracting the paper? Yes and no… Even if it were the case that someone defended the indefensible to an irrational degree, and at the moment of realisation offered to take the blame while also explicitly blaming someone else, the paper was retracted. This is the ‘no’ part. The ‘yes’ arises from Ramesh’s actions on PubPeer, to ‘keep going until one can go no longer’, so to speak, which suggests, among other things – and I’m shooting in the dark here – that she somehow couldn’t spot the problem right away. So giving her credit for the retraction would set a low, if also weird, bar; I think credit belongs on this count with the fastidious commenters of PubPeer. Ramesh would still have had to sign off on a document saying “we’ve agreed to have the paper retracted”, as journals typically require, but perhaps we can also speculate as to whom we should really thank for this outcome – anyone/anything from Ramesh herself to the looming threat of public pressure.

    Against this messy background, are we setting a low bar by giving Arati Ramesh brownie points for retracting the paper? No. Even if it were the case that someone defended the indefensible to an irrational degree, and at the moment of realisation offered to take the blame while also explicitly blaming someone else, the paper was retracted. Perhaps we can speculate as to whom we should thank for this outcome – Arati Ramesh herself, someone else in her lab, members of the internal inquiry committee that NCBS set up, some others members of the institute or even the looming threat of public pressure. We don’t have to give Ramesh credit here beyond her signing off on the decision (as journals typically require) – and we still need answers on all the other pieces of this puzzle, as well as accountability.

    A final point: I hope that the intense focus that the NCBS fracas has commanded – and could continue to considering Bik has flagged one more paper coauthored by Ramesh and others have flagged two coauthored by her partner Sunil Laxman (published in 2005 and 2006), both on PubPeer for potential image manipulation – will widen to encompass the many instances of misconduct popping up every week across the country.

    NCBS, as we all know, is an elite institute as India’s centres of research go: it is well-funded (by the Department of Atomic Energy, a government body relatively free from bureaucratic intervention), staffed by more-than-competent researchers and students, has published commendable research (I’m told), has a functional outreach office, and whose scientists often feature in press reports commenting on this or that other study. As such, it is overrepresented in the public imagination and easily gets attention. However, the problems assailing NCBS vis-à-vis the reports on PubPeer are not unique to the institute, and should in fact force us to rethink our tendency (mine included) to give such impressive institutes – often, and by no coincidence, Brahmin strongholds – the benefit of the doubt.

    (1. I have no idea how things are at India’s poorly funded state and smaller private universities, but even there, and in fact at the overall less-elite and but still “up there” in terms of fortunes, institutes, like the IISERs, Brahmins have been known to dominate the teaching and professorial staff, if not the students, and still have been found guilty of misconduct, often sans accountability. 2. There’s a point to be made here about plagiarism, the graded way in which it is ‘offensive’, access to good quality English education to people of different castes in India, a resulting access to plus inheritance of cultural and social capital, and the funneling of students with such capital into elite institutes.)

    As I mentioned earlier, Retraction Watch has an ‘India retractions’ category (although to be fair, there are also similar categories for China, Italy, Japan and the UK, but not for France, Russia, South Korea or the US. These countries ranked 1-10 on the list of countries with the most scientific and technical journal publications in 2018.) Its database lists 1,349 papers with at least one author affiliated with an Indian institute that have been retracted – and five papers since the NCBS one met its fate. The latest one was retracted on July 7, 2021 (after being published on October 16, 2012). Again, these are just instances in which a paper was retracted. Further up the funnel, we have retractions that Retraction Watch missed, papers that editors are deliberating on, complaints that editors have rejected, complaints that editors have ignored, complaints that editors haven’t yet received, and journals that don’t care.

    So, retractions – and retractors – deserve brownie points.

  • NCBS retraction – addenda

    My take on the NCBS paper being retracted, and the polarised conversation that has erupted around the incident, is here. The following are some points I’d like to add.

    a. Why didn’t the editorial and peer-review teams at Nature Chemical Biology catch the mistakes before the paper was published? As the work of famous research-fraud detective Dr Elisabeth Bik has shown, detecting image manipulation is sometimes easy and sometimes hard. But what is untenable are claims by some scientists, and journals as well, that peer-review is a non-negotiable requirement to ensure the scientific literature remains of ‘high quality’. Nature Chemical Biology also tries to launder its image by writing in its retraction notice that the paper was withdrawn because the authors could not reproduce its results. Being unable to reproduce results is a far less egregious offence than manipulating images. What the journal is defending here is its peer-review process.

    b. Nature Chemical Biology continues to hold the retracted paper behind a paywall ($9 to rent, EUR 55.14 to subscribe to the journal for a year). I expect readers of this blog to know the background to why paywalls are bad, etc., but I would have thought a retracted paper would be released into the public domain. It’s important for everyone to know the ways in which a paper was flawed post-retraction, especially one that has commanded so much public attention (at least as retractions go). Unless of course this is Nature Chemical Biology acknowledging that paywalls are barriers more than anything else, and the journals’ editors can hide their and their peer-review’s failure this way.

    c. The (now retracted) Arati Ramesh et al result was amazing, etc. but given some social media conversations are focused on why Ramesh didn’t double-check a result that was so significant as to warrant open celebration once the paper was published, some important background info: the result was great but not entirely unexpected. In April 2020, Jianson Xu and Joseph Cotruvo reported that a known riboswitch that bound to nickel and cobalt ions also had features that allowed it to bind to iron. (Ramesh et al’s paper also cites another study from 2015 with a similar claim.) Ramesh et al reported that they had found just such behaviour in a riboswitch (present in a different bacterial species). However, many of the images in their paper appeared to be wholly manipulated, undermining the results. It’s still possible (I think) that someone else could make a legitimate version of the same discovery.

  • Pseudoscientific materials and thermoeconomics

    The Shycocan Corp. took out a full-page jacket ad in the Times of India on June 22 – the same day The Telegraph (UK) had a story about GBP 2,900 handbags by Gucci that exist only online, in some videogame. The Shycocan product’s science is questionable, at best, though its manufacturers have disagreed vehemently with this assessment. (Anusha Krishnan wrote a fantastic article for The Wire Science on this topic). The Gucci ‘product’ is capitalism redigesting its own bile, I suppose – a way to create value out of thin air. This is neither new nor particularly exotic: I have paid not inconsiderable sums of money in the past for perks inside videogames, often after paying for the games themselves. But thinking about both products led me to a topic called thermoeconomics.

    This may be too fine a point but the consumerism implicit in both the pixel-handbags and Shycocan and other medical devices of unproven efficacy has a significant thermodynamic cost. While pixel-handbags may represent a minor offense, so to speak, in the larger scheme of things, their close cousins, the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of the cryptocurrency universe, are egregiously energy-intensive. (More on this here.) NFTs represent an extreme case of converting energy into monetary value, bringing into sharp focus the relationships between economics and thermodynamics that we often ignore because they are too muted.

    Free energy, entropy and information are three of the many significant concepts at the intersection of economics and thermodynamics. Free energy is the energy available to perform useful work. Entropy is energy that is disorderly and can’t be used to perform useful work. Information, a form of negative entropy, and the other two concepts taken together are better illustrated by the following excerpt, from this paper:

    Consider, as an example, the process of converting a set of raw materials, such as iron ore, coke, limestone and so forth, into a finished product—a piece of machinery of some kind. At each stage the organization (information content) of the materials embodied in the product is increased (the entropy is decreased), while global entropy is increased through the production of waste materials and heat. For example:

    Extraction activities start with the mining of ores, followed by concentration or benefication. All of these steps increase local order in the material being processed, but only by using (dissipating) large quantities of available work derived from burning fuel, wearing out machines and discarding gauge and tailings.

    Metallurgical reduction processes mostly involve the endothermic chemical reactions to separate minerals into the desired element and unwanted impurities such as slag, CO2 and sulfur oxides. Again, available work in the form of coal, oil or natural gas is used up to a much greater extent than is embodied in metal, and there is a physical wear and tear on machines, furnaces and so forth, which must be discarded eventually.

    Petroleum refining involves fractionating the crude oil, cracking heavier fractions, and polymerizing, alkylating or reforming lighter ones. These processes require available work, typically 10% or so of the heating value of the petroleum itself. Petrochemical feedstocks such as olefins or alcohols are obtained by means of further endo- thermic conversion processes. Inorganic chemical processes begin by endothermic reduction of commonplace salts such as chlorides, fluorides or carbonates into their components. Again, available work (from electricity or fuel) is dissipated in each step.

    Fabrication involves the forming of materials into parts with desirable forms and shapes. The information content, or orderliness, of the product is increased, but only by further expending available work.

    Assembly and construction involves the linking of components into complex subsystems and systems. The orderliness of the product continues to increase, but still more available work is used up in the processes. The simultaneous buildup of local order and global entropy during a materials processing sequence is illustrated in figure 4. Some, but not all of the orderliness of the manufactured product is recoverable as thermodynamically available work: Plastic or paper products, for example, can be burned as fuel in a boiler to recover their residual heating value and con- vert some of that to work again. Using scrap instead of iron ore in the manufacture of steel or recycled aluminum instead of bauxite makes use of some of the work expended in the initial refining of the ore.

    Some years ago, I read an article about a debate between a physicist and an economist; I’m unable to find the link now. The physicist says infinite economic growth is impossible because the laws of thermodynamics forbid it. Eventually, we will run out of free energy and entropy will become more abundant, and creating new objects will exact very high, and increasing, resource costs. The economist counters that what a person values doesn’t have to be encoded as objects – that older things can re-acquire new value or become more valuable, or that we will be able to develop virtual objects whose value doesn’t incur the same costs that their physical counterparts do.

    This in turn recalls the concept of eco-economic decoupling – the idea that we can continue and/or expand economic activity without increasing environmental stresses and pollution at the same time. Is this possible? Are we en route to achieving it?

    The Solar System – taken to be the limit of Earth’s extended neighbourhood – is very large but still finite, and the laws of thermodynamics stipulate that it can thus contain a finite amount of energy. What is the maximum number of dollars we can extract through economic activities using this energy? A pro-consumerist brigade believes absolute eco-economic decoupling is possible; at least one of its subscribers, a Michael Liebreich, has written that in fact infinite growth is possible. But NFTs suggest we are not at all moving in the right direction – nor does any product that extracts a significant thermodynamic cost with incommensurate returns (and not just economic ones). Pseudoscientific hardware – by which I mean machines and devices that claim to do something but have no evidence to show for it – belongs in the same category.

    This may not be a productive way to think of problematic entities right now, but it is still interesting to consider that, given we have a finite amount of free energy, and that increasing the efficiency with which we use it is closely tied to humankind’s climate crisis, pseudoscientific hardware can be said to have a climate cost. In fact, the extant severity of the climate crisis already means that even if we had an infinite amount of free energy, thermodynamic efficiency is more important right now. I already think of flygskam in this way, for example: airplane travel is not pseudoscientific, but it can be irrational given its significant carbon footprint, and the privileged among us need to undertake it only with good reason. (I don’t agree with the idea the way Greta Thunberg does, but that’s a different article.)

    To quote physicist Tom Murphy:

    Let me restate that important point. No matter what the technology, a sustained 2.3% energy growth rate would require us to produce as much energy as the entire sun within 1400 years. A word of warning: that power plant is going to run a little warm. Thermodynamics require that if we generated sun-comparable power on Earth, the surface of the Earth—being smaller than that of the sun—would have to be hotter than the surface of the sun! …

    The purpose of this exploration is to point out the absurdity that results from the assumption that we can continue growing our use of energy—even if doing so more modestly than the last 350 years have seen. This analysis is an easy target for criticism, given the tunnel-vision of its premise. I would enjoy shredding it myself. Chiefly, continued energy growth will likely be unnecessary if the human population stabilizes. At least the 2.9% energy growth rate we have experienced should ease off as the world saturates with people. But let’s not overlook the key point: continued growth in energy use becomes physically impossible within conceivable timeframes. The foregoing analysis offers a cute way to demonstrate this point. I have found it to be a compelling argument that snaps people into appreciating the genuine limits to indefinite growth.

    And … And Then There’s Physics:

    As I understand it, we can’t have economic activity that simply doesn’t have any impact on the environment, but we can choose to commit resources to minimising this impact (i.e., use some of the available energy to avoid increasing entropy, as Liebreich suggests). However, this would seem to have a cost and it seems to me that we mostly spend our time convincing ourselves that we shouldn’t yet pay this cost, or shouldn’t pay too much now because people in the future will be richer. So, my issue isn’t that I think we can’t continue to grow our economies while decoupling economic activity from environmental impact, I just think that we won’t.

    A final point: information is considered negative entropy because it describes certainty – something we know that allows us to organise materials in such a way as to minimise disorder. However, what we consider to be useful information, thanks to capitalism, nationalism (it is not for nothing that Shycocan’s front-page ad ends with a “Jai Hind”), etc., has become all wonky, and all forms of commercialised pseudoscience are good examples of this.

  • Bharat Biotech gets 1/10 for tweet

    If I had been Bharat Biotech’s teacher and “Where is your data?” had been an examination question, Bharat Biotech would have received 1 out of 10 marks.

    The correct answer to where is your data can take one of two forms: either an update in the form of where the data is in the data-processing pipeline or to actually produce the data. The latter in fact would have deserved a bonus point, if only because the question wasn’t precise enough. The question should really have been a demand – “Submit your data” – instead of allowing the answerer, in its current form, to get away with simply stating where the data currently rests. Bharat Biotech gets 1/10 because it does neither; the 1 is for correct spelling.

    In fact, the company’s chest-thumping based on publishing nine papers in 12 months is symptomatic of a larger problem with the student. He fails to understand that only data is data, and that the demand for data is a demand for data per se. It ought not to be confused with a demand for authority. Data accords authority in an object-oriented and democratic sense. With data, everyone else can see for themselves – whether by themselves or through the mouths and minds of independent experts they trust – if the student’s claims hold up. And if they do, they confer the object of the data, the COVID-19 vaccine named Covaxin, with attributes like reliability.

    (Why ‘he’? The patriarchal conditions in and with which science has operated around the world, but especially in Europe and the US, in the last century or so have diffused into scientific practice itself, in terms of how the people at large have constituted – as well as have been expected to constitute, by the scientific community – scientific authority, expertise’s immunity to criticism and ownership of knowledge production and dissemination apparatuses, typically through “discrimination, socialisation and the gender division of labour”. Irrespective of the means – although both from the company’s and the government’s sides, very few women have fielded and responded to questions about drug/vaccine approvals – we already see these features in the manner in which ‘conventional’ scientific journals have sought to retain their place in the international knowledge production economy, and their tendency to resort to arguments that they serve an important role in it even as they push for anti-transparent practices, from the scientific papers’ contents to details about why they charge so much money.)

    However, the student has confused authority of this kind with authority of a kind we more commonly associate with the conventional scientific publishing paradigm: in which journals are gatekeepers of scientific knowledge – both in terms of what topics they ‘accept’ manuscripts on and what they consider to be ‘good’ results; and in which a paper, once published, is placed behind a steeply priced paywall that keeps both knowledge of the paper’s contents and the terms of its ‘acceptance’ by the journal beyond public scrutiny – even when public money funded the research described therein. As such, his insistence that we be okay with his having published nine papers in 12 months is really his insistence that we vest our faith in scientific journals, and by extension their vaunted decision to ‘approve of’ his work. This confusion on his part is also reflected in what he offers as his explanation for the absence of data in the public domain, but which are really his excuses.

    Our scientific commitment as a company stands firm with data generation, data transparency and peer-reviewed publications.

    Sharing your data in a secluded channel with government bodies is not data transparency. That’s what the student needs for regulatory approval. Transparency applies when the data is available for everyone else to independently access, understand and check.

    Phase 3 final analysis data will be available soon. Final analysis requires efficacy and 2 months safety follow-up data on all subjects. This is mandated by CDSCO and USFDA. Final analysis will first be submitted to CDSCO, followed by submissions to peer reviewed journals and media dissemination.

    What is required by CDSCO does not matter to those allowing Bharat Biotech’s vaccines into the bloodstreams, and in fact every Indian on whom the student has inflicted this pseudo-choice. And at this point to invoke what the USFDA requires can only lead to a joke: studies of the vaccines involved in the formal vaccination drive have already been published in the US; even studies of new vaccines as well as follow-ups of existing formulations are being placed in the public domain through preprint papers that describe the data from soup to nuts. All we got from the student vis-à-vis Covaxin this year was interim phase 3 trial data in early March, announced through a press release, and devoid even of error bars for its most salient claims.

    So even for an imprecisely worded question, it has done well to elicit a telling answer from the student: that the data does not exist, and the student believes he is too good for us all.

    Thanks to Jahnavi Sen for reading the article before it was published.

  • ‘Science people’

    Two of the most annoying kinds of ‘science people’ I’ve come across on social media of late:

    • Those who perform rationalism – These people seem to know a small subset of things well and the rest on faith, and claim to know that “science can explain everything” without being able to explain it themselves. Champions of science’s right to explanation, typically to the exclusion of social and cultural influences and to the rejection of faith/religion. Often woke-types found explaining “science” they read in some paper and more often than not (and inadvertently) advancing scientistic positions.
    • Vocational practitioners of science – These people seem to know a small subset of things well but are unable to apply the fundamentals of what they’ve learnt to other topics, typically to the effect that we have well-educated people openly suspecting if vaccines cause disease or that China created the virus. Often engineers of some sort, probably because of the environments of entitlement in which they’re trained and subsequently employed, and frequently centrists.

    Of course, a trait that partly defines these two groups is also a strong confounding factor: these are often the loudest people on the social media – so they get noticed more, while the quieter but likely more sensible people are noticed less, leading to inchoate observations like this one. However, these two groups of people remain the most annoying.

  • On the lab-leak hypothesis

    One problem with the debate over the novel coronavirus’s “lab leak” origin hypothesis is a problem I’m starting to see in quite a few other areas of pandemic-related analysis and discussion. It’s that no one will say why others are wrong, even as they insist others are, and go on about why they are right.

    Shortly after I read Nicholas Wade’s 10,000-word article on Medium, I pitched a summary to a medical researcher, whose first, and for a long time only, response was one word: “rubbish”. Much later, he told me about how the virus could have evolved and spread naturally. Even if I couldn’t be sure if he was right, having no way to verify the information except to bounce it off a bunch of other experts, I was sure he thought he was right. But how was Wade wrong? I suspect for many people the communication failures surrounding this (or a similar) question may be a sticking point.

    (‘Wade’, after the first mention, is shorthand for an author of a detailed, non-trivial article that considers the lab-leak hypothesis, irrespective of what conclusion it reaches. I’m cursorily aware of Wade’s support for ‘scientific racism’, and by using his name, I don’t condone any of his views on these and other matters. Other articles to read on the lab-leak topic include Nicholson Baker’s in Intelligencer and Katherine Eban’s in Vanity Fair.)

    We don’t know how the novel coronavirus originated, nor are we able to find out easily. There are apparently two possibilities: zoonotic spillover and lab-leak (both hypotheses even though the qualification has been more prominently attached to the latter).

    Quoting two researchers writing in The Conversation:

    In March 2020, another article published in Nature Medicine provided a series of scientific arguments in favour of a natural origin. The authors argued: The natural hypothesis is plausible, as it is the usual mechanism of emergence of coronaviruses; the sequence of SARS-CoV-2 is too distantly related from other known coronaviruses to envisage the manufacture of a new virus from available sequences; and its sequence does not show evidence of genetic manipulation in the laboratory.

    Proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis (minus the outright-conspiratorial) – rather more broadly the opponents of the ‘zoonotic-spillover’-evangelism – have argued that lab leaks are more common than we think, the novel coronavirus has some features that suggest the presence of a human hand, and a glut of extra-scientific events that point towards suspicious research and communication by members of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

    However, too many counterarguments to Wade’s and others’ articles along similar lines have been to brush the allegations aside, as if they were so easily dismissed – like my interlocutor’s “rubbish”. And it’s an infuriating response. To me at least (as someone who’s been at the receiving end of many such replies), it smacks of an attitude that seems to say (a) “you’re foolish to take this stuff seriously,” (b) “you’re being a bad journalist,” (c) “I doubt you’ll understand the answer,” and (d) “I think you should just trust me”.

    I try not to generalise (c) and (d) to maintain my editorial equipoise, so to speak – but it’s been hard. There’s too much of too many scientists going around insisting we should simply listen to them, while making no efforts to ensure non-experts can understand what they’re saying, much less admitting the possibility that they’re kidding themselves (although I do think “science is self-correcting” is a false adage). In fact, proponents of the zoonotic-spillover hypothesis and others like to claim that their idea is more likely, but this is often a crude display of scientism: “it’s more scientific, therefore it must be true”. The arguments in favour of this hypothesis are also being increasingly underrepresented outside the scientific literature, which isn’t a trivial consideration because the disparity could exacerbate the patronising tone of (c) and (d), and render scientists less trustworthy.

    Science communication and/or journalism are conspicuous by absence here, but I also think the problem with the scientists’ attitude is broader than that. Short of engaging directly in the activities of groups like DRASTIC, journalists take a hit when scientists behave like pedagogic communication is a waste of time. More scientists should make more of an effort to articulate themselves better. It isn’t wise to dismiss something that so many take seriously – although this is also a slippery slope: apply it as a general rule, and soon you may find yourself having to debunk in great detail a dozen ridiculous claims a day. Perhaps we can make an exception for the zoonotic-spillover v. lab-leak hypotheses contest? Or is there a better heuristic? I certainly think there should be one instead of having none at all.

    Proving the absence is harder than proving the presence of something, and that’s why everyone might be talking about why they’re right. However, in the process, many of these people seem to forget that what they haven’t denied is still firmly in the realm of the possible. Actually, they don’t just forget it but entirely shut down the idea. This is why I agree with Dr Vinay Prasad’s words in MedPage Today:

    If it escaped due to a wet market, I would strongly suggest we clean up wet markets and improve safety in BSL laboratories because a future virus could come from either. And, if it was a lab leak, I would strongly suggest we clean up wet markets and improve safety in BSL 3 and 4 … you get the idea. Both vulnerabilities must be fixed, no matter which was the culprit in this case, because either could be the culprit next time.

    His words provide an important counterweight of sorts to a tendency from the zoonotic-spillover quarter to treat articles about the lab-leak possibility as a monolithic allegation instead of as a collection of independent allegations that aren’t equally unlikely. For example, the Vanity Fair, Newsweek and Wade’s articles have all also called into question safety levels at BSL 3 and 4 labs, whether their pathogen-handling protocols sufficiently justify the sort of research we think is okay to conduct, and allegations that various parties have sought to suppress information about the activities at such facilities housed in the Wuhan Institute.

    I don’t buy the lab-leak hypothesis and I don’t buy the zoonotic-spillover hypothesis; in fact, I don’t personally care for the answer because I have other things to worry about, but I do buy that the “scientific illiberalism” that Dr Prasad talks about is real. And it’s tied to other issues doing the rounds now as well. For example, Newsweek‘s profile of DRASTIC’s work has been a hit in India thanks to the work of ‘The Seeker’, the pseudonym for a person in their 20s living in “Eastern India”, who uncovered some key documents that cast suspicion on Wuhan Institute’s Shi Zhengli’s claims vis-à-vis SARS-CoV-2. And two common responses to the profile (on Twitter) have been:

    1. “In 2020, when people told me about the lab-leak hypothesis, I dismissed them and argued that they shouldn’t take WhatsApp forwards seriously.”
    2. “Journalism is redundant.”

    (1) is said as if it’s no longer true – but it is. The difference between the WhatsApp forwards of February-April 2020 and the articles and papers of 2021 is the body of evidence each set of claims was based on. Luc Montagnier was wrong when he spoke against the zoonotic-spillover hypothesis last year simply because his reasoning was wrong. The reasons and the evidence matter; otherwise, you’re no better than a broken clock. Facile WhatsApp forwards and right-wingers’ ramblings continue to deserve to be treated with extreme scepticism.

    Just because a conspiracy theory is later proven to have merit doesn’t make it not a conspiracy theory; their defining trait is belief in the absence of evidence. The most useful response, here, is not to get sucked into the right-wing fever swamps, but to isolate legitimate questions, and try and report out the answers.

    Columbia Journalism Review, April 15, 2020

    The second point is obviously harder to fight back, considering it doesn’t stake a new position as much as reinforces one that certain groups of people have harboured for many years now. It’s one star aligning out of many, so its falling out of place won’t change believers’ minds, and because the believers’ minds will be unchanged, it will promptly fall back in place. This said, apart from the numerous other considerations, I’ll say investigations aren’t the preserve of journalists, and one story that was investigated to a greater extent by non-journalists – especially towards a conclusion that you probably wish to be true – has little necessarily to do with journalism.

    In addition, the picture is complicated by the fact that when people find that they’re wrong, they almost never admit it – especially if other valuable things, like their academic or political careers, are tied up with their reputation. On occasion, some turn to increasingly more technical arguments, or close ranks and advertise a false ‘scientific consensus’ (insofar as such consensus can exist as the result of any exercise less laborious than the one vis-à-vis anthropogenic global warming), or both. ‘Isolating the legitimate questions’ here apart – from both sides, mind you – needs painstaking work that only journalists can and will do.

    Featured image credit: Ethan Medrano/Pexels.

  • Broken clocks during the pandemic

    Proponents of conspiracy theories during the pandemic, at least in India, appear to be like broken clocks: they are right by coincidence, without the right body of evidence to back their claims. Two of the most read articles published by The Wire Science in the last 15 months have been the fact-checks of Luc Montagnier’s comments on the two occasions he spoke up in the French press. On the first, he said the novel coronavirus couldn’t have evolved naturally; the second, he insisted mass vaccination was a big mistake. The context in which Montagnier published his remarks evolved considerably between the two events, and it tells an important story.

    When Montagnier said in April 2020 that the virus was lab-made, the virus’s spread was just beginning to accelerate in India, Europe and the US, and the proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis to explain the virus’s origins had few listeners and were consigned firmly to the margins of popular discourse on the subject. In this environment, Montagnier’s comments stuck out like a sore thumb, and were easily dismissed.

    But when Montagnier said in May 2021 that mass vaccination is a mistake, the context was quite different: in the intervening period, Nicholas Wade had published his article on why we couldn’t dismiss the lab-leak hypothesis so quickly; the WHO’s missteps were more widely known; China’s COVID-19 outbreak had come completely under control (actually or for all appearances); many vaccine-manufacturers’ immoral and/or unethical business practices had come to light; more people were familiar with the concept and properties of viral strains; the WHO had filed its controversial report on the possible circumstances of the virus’s origins in China; etc. As a result, speaking now, Montagnier wasn’t so quickly dismissed. Instead, he was, to many observers, the man who had got it right the first time, was brave enough to stick his neck out in support of an unpopular idea, and was speaking up yet again.

    The problem here is that Luc Montagnier is a broken clock – in the way even broken clocks are right twice a day: not because they actually tell the time but because the time is coincidentally what the clock face is stuck at. On both occasions, the conclusions of Montagnier’s comments coincided with what conspiracists have been going on about since the pandemic’s start, but on both occasions, his reasoning was wrong. The same has been true of many other claims made during the pandemic. People have said things that have turned out to be true but they themselves have always been wrong, whenever they have been wrong, because their particular reasons for something to be true were wrong.

    That is, unless you can say why you’re right, you’re not right. Unless you can explain why the time is what it is, you’re not a clock!

    Montagnier’s case also illuminates a problem with soothsaying: if you wish to be a prophet, it is in your best interests to make as many predictions as possible – to increase the odds of reality coinciding with at least one prediction in time. And when such a coincidence does happen, it doesn’t mean the prophet was right; it means they weren’t wrong. There is a big difference between these positions, and which becomes pronounced when the conspiratorially-minded start incorporating every article published anywhere, from The Wire Science to The Daily Guardian, into their narratives of choice.

    As the lab-leak hypothesis moved from the fringes of society to the centre and came mistakenly to conflate possibility with likelihood (i.e. zoonotic spillover and lab-leak are two valid hypotheses for the virus’s origins but they aren’t equally likely to be true), the conspiratorial proponents of the lab-leak hypotheses (the ones given to claiming Chinese scientists engineered the pathogen as a weapon, etc.) have steadily woven imaginary threads between the hypothesis and Indian scientists who opposed Covaxin’s approval, the Congress leaders who “mooted” vaccine hesitancy in their constituencies, scientists who made predictions that came to be wrong, even vaccines that were later found to have rare side-effects restricted to certain demographic groups.

    The passage of time is notable here. I think adherents of lab-leak conspiracies are motivated by an overarching theory born entirely of speculation, not evidence, and who then pick and choose from events to build the case that the theory is true. I say ‘overarching’ because, to the adherents, the theory is already fully formed and true, and that pieces of it become visible to observers as and when the corresponding events play out. This could explain why time is immaterial to them. You and I know that Shahid Jameel and Gagandeep Kang cast doubt on Covaxin’s approval (and not Covaxin itself) after the time we were aware that Covaxin’s phase 3 clinical trials were only just getting started in December, and before Covishield’s side-effects in Europe and the US came to light (with the attendant misreporting). We know that at the time Luc Montagnier said the novel coronavirus was made in a lab, last year, we didn’t know nearly enough about the structural biology underlying the virus’s behaviour; we do now.

    The order of events matters: we went from ignorance to knowledge, from knowing to knowing more, from thinking one thing to – in the face of new information – thinking another. But the conspiracy-theorists and their ideas lie outside of time: the order of events doesn’t matter; instead, to these people, 2021, 2022, 2023, etc. are preordained. They seem to be simply waiting for the coincidences to roll around.

    An awareness of the time dimension (so to speak), or more accurately of the arrow of time, leads straightforwardly to the proper practice of science in our day-to-day affairs as well. As I said, unless you can say why you’re right, you’re not right. This is why effects lie in the future of causes, and why theories lie in the causal future of evidence. What we can say to be true at this moment depends entirely on what we know at this moment. If we presume what we can say at this moment to be true will always be true, we become guilty of dragging our theory into the causal history of the evidence – simply because we are saying that the theory will come true given enough time in which evidence can accrue.

    This protocol (of sorts) to verify the truth of claims isn’t restricted to the philosophy of science, even if it finds powerful articulation there: a scientific theory isn’t true if it isn’t falsifiable outside its domain of application. It is equally legitimate and necessary in the daily practice of science and its methods, on Twitter and Facebook, in WhatsApp groups, every time your father, your cousin or your grand-uncle begins a question with “If the lab-leak hypothesis isn’t true…”.

  • On the International Day of Light, remembering darkness

    Today is the International Day of Light. According to a UNESCO note:

    The International Day of Light is celebrated on 16 May each year, the anniversary of the first successful operation of the laser in 1960 by physicist and engineer, Theodore Maiman. This day is a call to strengthen scientific cooperation and harness its potential to foster peace and sustainable development.

    While there are natural lasers, the advent of the laser in Maiman’s hands portended an age of manipulating light to make big advances in a variety of fields. Some applications that come immediately to mind are communications, laser-guided missiles, laser cooling and astronomy. I’m not sure why “the first successful operation of the laser” came to be commemorated as a ‘day of light’, but since it has, its association with astronomy is interesting.

    Astronomers have found themselves collecting to protest the launch and operation of satellite constellations, notably SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s upcoming Project Kuiper, after the first few Starlink satellites interfered with astronomical observations. SpaceX has since acknowledged the problem and said it will reduce the reflectance of the satellites it launches, but I don’t think the problem has been resolved. Further, the constellation isn’t complete: thousands of additional satellites will be launched in the coming years, and will be joined by other constellations as well, and the full magnitude of the problem may only become apparent then.

    Nonetheless, astronomers’ opposition to such projects brought the idea of the night sky as a shared commons into the public spotlight. Just like arid lands, butterfly colonies and dense jungles are part of our ecological commons, and plateaus, shelves and valleys make up our geological commons, and so on – all from which the human species draws many benefits, an obstructed view of the night sky and the cosmic objects embedded therein characterise the night sky as a commons. And as we draw tangible health and environmental benefits from terrestrial commons, the view of the night sky has, over millennia, offered humans many cultural benefits as well.

    However, this conflict between SpaceX, etc. on one hand and the community of astronomers on the other operates at a higher level, so to speak: its resolution in favour of astronomers, for example, still only means – for example – operating fewer satellites or satellites at a higher altitude, avoiding major telescopes’ fields of view, painting the underside with a light-absorbing substance, etc. The dispute is unlikely to have implications for the night sky as a commons of significant cultural value. If it is indeed to be relevant, the issue needs to become deep enough to accommodate, and continue to draw the attention and support of academics and corporations for, the non-rivalrous enjoyment of the night sky with the naked eye, for nothing other than to write better poems, have moonlight dinners and marvel at the stars.

    As our fight to preserve our ecological commons has hardened in the face of a state bent on destroying them to line the pockets of its capital cronies, I think we have also started to focus on the economic and other tangible benefits this commons offers us – at the cost of downplaying a transcendental right to their sensual enjoyment. Similarly, we shouldn’t have to justify the importance of the night sky as a commons beyond saying we need to be able to enjoy it.

    Of course such an argument is bound to be accused of being disconnected from reality, that the internet coverage Starlink offers will be useful for people living in as-yet unconnected or poorly connected areas – and I agree. We can’t afford to fight all our battles at once if we also expect to reap meaningful rewards in a reasonably short span of time, so let me invoke a reminder that the night sky is an environmental resource as well: “Let us be reminded, as we light the world to suit our needs and whims,” a 2005 book wrote, “that doing so may come at the expense of other living beings, some of whom detect subtle gradations of light to which we are blind, and for whom the night is home.”

    More relevant to our original point, of the International Day of Light, astronomy and the night sky as a commons, a study published in 2016 reported the following data:

    According to the study paper (emphasis added):

    The sky brightness levels are those used in the tables and indicate the following: up to 1% above the natural light (0 to 1.7 μcd/m2; black); from 1 to 8% above the natural light (1.7 to 14 μcd/m2; blue); from 8 to 50% above natural nighttime brightness (14 to 87 μcd/m2; green); from 50% above natural to the level of light under which the Milky Way is no longer visible (87 to 688 μcd/m2; yellow); from Milky Way loss to estimated cone stimulation (688 to 3000 μcd/m2; red); and very high nighttime light intensities, with no dark adaption for human eyes (>3000 μcd/m2; white).

    That is, in India, ‘only’ a fifth of the population experiences a level of light pollution that obscures the faintest view of the Milky Way – but in Saudi Arabia, at the other end of the spectrum, nearly 92% of the population is correspondingly unfortunate (not that I presume they care).

    DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1600377
    DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1600377

    While India has a few red dots, it is green almost nearly everywhere and blue nearly everywhere, lest we get carried away. Why, in March this year, Dorje Angchuk, an engineer at the Indian Astronomical Observatory in Hanle who has come to be celebrated for his beautiful photographs of the night sky over Ladakh, tweeted the following images that demonstrate how even highly localised light pollution, which may not be well-represented on global maps, can affect the forms and hues in which the night sky is available to us.

    The distribution of colours also reinforces our understanding of cities as economic engines – where more lights shine brighter and, although this map doesn’t show it, more pollutants hang in the air. The red dots over India coincide roughly with the country’s major urban centres: New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai. Photographs of winter mornings in New Delhi show the sky as an orange-brown mass through which even the Sun is barely visible; other stars are out of the question, even after astronomical twilight.

    But again, we’re not going to have much luck if our demands to reduce urban emissions are premised on our inability to have an unobstructed view of the night sky. At the same time we must achieve this victory: there’s no reason our street lamps and other public lighting facilities need to throw light upwards, that our billboards need to be visible from above, etc., and perhaps every reason for human settlements – even if they aren’t erected around or near optical telescopes – to turn off as many lights as they can between 10 pm and 6 am. The regulation of light needs to be part of our governance. And the International Day of Light should be a reminder that our light isn’t the only light we need, that darkness is a virtue as well.

  • Being apolitical doesn’t mean politics doesn’t exist

    A few years ago, we had a writer who would constantly pitch articles to us about how the Indian government should be doing X, Y or Z in the fight against this or that disease. Their submissions grew quickly tiresome, and then wholly ridiculous when, in one article (well before the pandemic), they wrote that “the government should distribute good-quality masks for TB patients to use”. That the government should do this is a banal truism. But to make this recommendation over and over risks hiding from sight the fact that the government probably isn’t doing it not because it doesn’t know it should be done but because it has decided that what it is doing is more important, more necessary.

    I find myself contending with many similar articles today. It is people’s right to express themselves, especially on counts on which the Indian government has dropped the ball via-à-vis the country’s COVID-19 epidemic. But to repeat recommendations that are often staring most of us in our faces I fear could be harmful – by only reminding us of what needs to be done but hasn’t been, over and over, is an act that deepens the elision and then the forgetting of the real reason why it hasn’t been done.

    This doesn’t mean reminders are redundant; to the contrary, there is important value in repetition, so that we may not lose sight of which outcomes are ultimately desirable. But in tandem, we also need to start acknowledging what could be standing in the way and contemplating honestly whether what we’re advocating for could surmount that barrier. (This issue is also of a piece with the one about processes and outcomes – whereby some commentators stress on what the outcomes can or should be but have nothing to say about the processes that will get us there.)

    For example, what happened to the rapid self-administered COVID-19 tests that many scientists in India developed last year? A reporter with an appetite for a small investigation could speak to the researchers, university administrators, the DST or the DBT as the case may be, and finally to officials in the Union health ministry, and weave together a story about where exactly in this pipeline of translation from the lab to the market the product vanished. There is value in knowing this but it is not paramount value. It is on equal footing with the view, from the perch of the political economy of public healthcare, that the Modi government is unlikely to okay the widespread use of such tests because many Indian states, especially BJP strongholds like Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat, are widely underreporting cases and deaths, and a state-managed project to suppress this data is easier to do with centralised testing facilities instead of freely distributed rapid tests whose results can also be quickly crowdsourced.

    Quite a few authors of articles (many of them scientists) also like to say that we shouldn’t politicise the pandemic. They ignore, deliberately or otherwise, the fact that all pandemics are political by default. By definition, a pandemic is an epidemic of the same disease occurring in multiple geographically distinct regions at the same time. Governments have to get involved to manage them. Pandemics are not, and should never be, carte blanche for scientists to assume power, their prescriptions to assume primacy and their priorities to assume importance – by default. This can only lead to tunnel vision that is blind to problems, and in fact solutions, that arise from social and political compulsions.

    Instead, it would be much more valuable if scientists, and in fact any expert in any field, could admit the politically motivated parts of a government’s response to its local epidemic instead of forcing everyone else to work around their fantasies of separation – and even better if they could join the collaborative efforts to develop solutions instead of trying to solve it like a science problem.

    Anthony Fauci demonstrates this same… attitude (for lack of a better word), in an interview to Indian Express. When asked how he might respond to India’s crisis, he said:

    The one thing I don’t want to do and I hope it doesn’t turn out this way, is to get involved in any sort of criticism of how India has handled the situation because then it becomes a political issue and I don’t want to do that since I’m a public health person and I’m not a political person.

    It just seems to me that, right now, India is in a very difficult and desperate situation. I just got off, in preparation for this interview, I watched a clip from CNN… it seems to me it’s a desperate situation. So when you have a situation like that you’ve got to look at the absolute immediate.

    I mean, first of all, I don’t know if India has put together a crisis group that would meet and start getting things organised. I heard from some of the people in the street bringing their mothers and their fathers and their sisters and their brothers searching for oxygen. They seem to think there really was not any organisation, any central organisation.

    When asked about what India should do towards getting more people vaccinated:

    You’ve got to get supplies. You’ve got to make contractual arrangements with the various companies that are out there in the world.

    😑 And what about the fact that the US didn’t just advance-book the doses it needed but hoarded enough to vaccine its population thrice over, and blocked a petition by India and South Africa, and some other countries, to release the patents on US-made vaccines to increase global supply?

    Fauci’s answers are, again, a reminder of which outcomes are or ought to be ultimately desirable – what goals we should be working towards – but simply repeating this needs to stop being a virtue. Fauci, like many others before him, doesn’t wish to consider why we’re not on the path to achieving these outcomes despite fairly common knowledge of their existence. He may not be a political person but being apolitical doesn’t mean politics isn’t involved. The bulk of India’s response to its COVID-19 epidemic has been driven by political strategy. Is the idea that even the ideal part science can play in this enterprise is decidedly finite so off-putting?

    And even if there is a legitimate aspiration to expand the part science should be allowed to play in pandemic governance, scientists need to begin by convincing political institutions – and not attempt to seize power. They may be tempted to, as we all are, because our current national government seems to think accountability is blasphemy, and without being accountable it has stopped speaking for the people of the country, even those who put it in power. Nonetheless, the fruits of scientific work need to be democratic, too.

    I would also contend that Fauci complicates the picture by implying that there can be a clean separation of political and scientific issues on this matter; many scientists in India and perhaps too many people in India have an elevated opinion of Fauci, to the point of considering his words to be gospel. As one friend put it recently, “Unbelievable – the idea that a single white man is the foremost disease epidemiologist in the world” (emphasis in the original). “How do people say it with a straight face?”

    This post isn’t intended to disparage Fauci, even if our exalted opinion of him deserves to be taken down a few notches. Instead, I hope it highlights how Fauci nicely demonstrates a deceptively trivial prejudice against politics that, I could argue, helped land India in its latest disaster. Even when he pitches, for example, that India should lock itself down for a few weeks – instead of a few months like it did last year – he is at liberty to ignore the aftermath. We are not. Does that mean a lockdown shouldn’t come to be? No. But if he accommodated the political in his considerations, will it mean a man of his smarts will be able to meaningfully contemplate what the problem could really be? Maybe.

    Featured image: Former US President Donald Trump, VP Mike Pence and NIAID director Anthony Fauci at a press briefing at the White House on April 16, 2020. Credit: Public domain.

  • COVID-19, AMR and India

    Maybe it’s not a coincidence that India is today the site of the world’s largest COVID-19 outbreak and the world’s most prominent source of antimicrobial resistant (AMR) pathogens, a.k.a. ‘superbugs’. The former fiasco is the product of failures on multiple fronts – including policy, infrastructure, logistics, politics and even ideology, before we need to consider faster-spreading variants of the novel coronavirus. I’m not sure of all the factors that have contributed to AMR’s burgeoning in India; some of them are irrational use of broad-spectrum antibiotics, poor public hygiene, laws that disprivilege ecological health and subpar regulation of hospital practices.

    But all this said, both the second COVID-19 wave and the rise of AMR have benefited from being able to linger in the national population for longer. The longer the novel coronavirus keeps circulating in the population, the more opportunities there are for new variants to appear; the longer pathogens are exposed repeatedly to antimicrobial agents in different environments, the more opportunities they have to develop resistance. And once these things happen, their effects on their respective crises are exacerbated by the less-than-ideal social, political and economic contexts in which they manifest.

    Again, I should emphasise that if these afflictions have been assailing India for such a long time and in increasingly stronger ways, it’s because of many distinct, and some overlapping, forces – but I think it’s also true that the resulting permission for pathogens to persist, at scale to boot, makes India more vulnerable than other countries might be to problems of the emergent variety. And given the failures that give rise to this vulnerability, this can be one hell of a vicious cycle.