Matt Ridley: An amateur sleuth is singlehandedly demolishing dangerous scientific groupthink

Sholto David has found a clumsy error in cancer studies across the world

Sholto David is a Newcastle University graduate who has made a name for himself as a “scientific sleuth”. Last year, he brought a case against the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston that resulted in a $15m (£11m) settlement of fraud allegations with the US Department of Justice.

Now he has found an astonishingly amateurish error in cancer studies across the world. The implications for public trust in science of this and other scandals are increasingly alarming.

In hundreds of studies that David looked at, scientists claimed to have found an effect on a tumour-suppressing gene called p16-INK4a, but had instead ordered the wrong antibody from commercial suppliers. They had bought an antibody that detects the activity of a different and irrelevant gene called p16-ARC, probably because it’s listed alphabetically first in the online catalogue.

As a result, teams of scientists from Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and even Wuhan have published results—often in high-impact journals—that make no sense. Yet the experts involved often claimed to have validated their hypotheses anyway.

As David put it: “What are we to make of cases like this where the wrong antibody was used but the authors still manage to rustle up interpretable results?” He blames “a mixture of outright fabrication, selective reporting, writing errors, and some teams blindly publishing contradictory findings without further questioning or curiosity”.

Science’s reputation is at stake

Earlier this year, it emerged that studies purporting to show microplastics in human organs were fatally flawed after mistaking natural body substances in fat for plastics. Motivated reasoning—the desire to obtain positive results to support sensational headlines or lucrative rewards—had led scientists to celebrate “false positive” data and make people unduly anxious.

Scarcely less shocking, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has finally laid to rest one extreme model of future carbon dioxide emissions, called RCP8.5. It never represented a realistic possible future, as the authors made clear 20 years ago. But tens of thousands of studies used this model. It generated scary headlines, influenced unrealistic policies and was used to justify financially lucrative insurance premiums.

Britain’s Met Office still uses RCP8.5 to predict what the climate will be like here in the 2070s. The Environment Agency predicts future river flows for flood prevention purposes based on RCP8.5 alone, even though it knows this is bonkers. Examine almost any scary headline about future climate change, and you will find RCP8.5 has been used.

During the Covid pandemic, scientists told us to “trust the science”, with the enthusiastic backing of the BBC and politicians. The implication was that there was only one correct view on matters such as airborne infection, modelling, lockdowns, school closures, masks and vaccine efficacy in preventing transmission.

When that view proved repeatedly to be wrong, trust in science took a hefty battering. Vaccine hesitancy is on the rise with disastrous implications for diseases such as measles. Who gave credence to cranks like Robert Kennedy, I asked scientist friends: you did.

Scientists, like all of us, are prone to confirmation bias, where they look for evidence to support their hunches and prejudices rather than to challenge them. What kept them honest in the past was that they relished the chance to challenge each other.

Now, with the insistence on “consensus”—another word for groupthink—and a monopoly of funding channels, dogma has been increasingly allowed to stifle debate. It does not help that science reporters, unlike those who tackle politics, the arts or business, often have a culture of deference rather than critique.

The self-correction mechanisms of scientific debate are no longer working well. Yet instead of tackling the problem with humility and reformation, the scientific establishment is inclined to lecture the public for our irrationality. Perhaps it should take a look in the mirror.