Changing consensus

In a recent episode of the rather excellent BBC science flagship Horizon, Sir Paul Nurse - fresh from his appointment to the presidency of the Royal Society - attempted to get to the bottom of why the public have fallen out of love with science. In point of fact, discovered Sir Paul, it seems it is scientists rather than science that have taken a tumble in public opinion.

The program lay the blame for this at the door of a string of scientific controversies and misinformation - the chief among which was the infamous Climate Gate - an incident journalist James Delingpole has been dining out on very successfully ever since. You see Delingpole doesn’t believe that climate scientists are being straight with us. It is his assertion that all research suggesting global warming and our role in it is untrustworthy.

As for Delingpole’s explanation of the research that he openly admits he hasn’t read - well, try as he might to cry foul at the suggestion he is a conspiracist - I fear that is exactly how he appears. His reasoning seems to be that, because of the vast amount of funding directed towards climate change research, then it must follow that researchers harboring any doubt as to anthropogenic global warming have their silence bought and paid for. If nothing else this highlights a man entirely unfamiliar with the pain of completing a grant application.

He goes on to claim in his very well read blog that Nurse was amiss when in his arrogance he privately told him he ‘just knew’ that scientists wouldn’t act in this way. Was Sir Paul naive here? Perhaps, yet this very same blog bills Delingpole as the writer and broadcaster who is ‘right about everything.’ When it comes to arrogance, people in glass houses - even if they are dismissive of the greenhouse effect - shouldn’t throw stones.

But I plan to stoke this mud fight no more - for one thing it polarises a debate that in all reality is too complex for such simplistic polemic. The point I wish to make is that scientific consensus is not something sacred constructed to evoke a cowering conformism in scientists - indeed as Sir Paul pointed out during the program, it is the discoveries that challenge and change consensus that really can make a scientists reputation. One such paper has recently caught my eye - and it suggests, entirely against current consensus, that the circadian clock found in the cells of all forms of life isn’t linked to DNA. The researchers found circadian activity in red blood cells - noteworthy for the lack of DNA. So where does this ancient body clock reside? That is yet to be discovered, but in doing so researchers will once again correct our knowledge and change consensus.