Science made astonishing progress. It was also hijacked by those with an axe to grind

[Judi Lynn]

Laura Spinney
Attacks and scepticism are on the rise, even as leaps are made in fields from gene editing and AI to interplanetary exploration

Thu 26 Dec 2019 05.00 ESTLast modified on Thu 26 Dec 2019 05.01 EST

The 2010s were the decade in which we were reminded that science is just a method, like the rhythm method. And just like the rhythm method, it can be more or less rigorously applied, sabotaged, overrated, underrated and ignored. If you don’t treat it with respect, you may not get the optimal result, but that’s not the method’s fault.

That may be where the similarities end, because when it’s done well, science is very effective, and this decade furnished its fair share of breakthroughs to make us gasp. Physicists detected phenomena that were predicted decades ago – gravitational waves, the Higgs boson particle – indicating that they have been on broadly the right track in their understanding of how the universe works. Astronomers added awe-inspiring detail. Nasa probes found towering ice mountains on Pluto and organic chemistry – the stuff of life – on Mars and a moon of Saturn. And who could forget the exoplanets – those planets orbiting distant stars? Thousands of them were discovered in just the past 10 years. No wonder science fiction is booming.

Biologists didn’t slack either. They honed an immunological defence mechanism found in bacteria, Crispr-Cas9, into a powerful gene-editing tool that works in plants and animals – including humans. They added several new ancestors to the human family tree – and discovered ghostly traces of others as yet unseen and unnamed. And very old DNA started giving up its secrets, after researchers succeeded in extracting it from ancient bodily remains and sequencing it. This threw open a huge window on our species’ past, revealing that every person alive today is the product of multiple migrations and that relations between different waves of migration have always been complicated. Neanderthals and modern humans probably clobbered each other, for example, but they also interbred.

But this was also the decade in which science was commandeered by all kinds of people with political, social and economic axes to grind. Ancient DNA researchers understood early on the potential for their discoveries to be politicised – the science of human origins always has been – but they still weren’t able to fully control the message. Thus we learned about white supremacists engaging in sinister milk-chugging parties in America, supposedly designed to smoke out people of non-European heritage who can’t digest lactose, and baseless claims made by some Hindu nationalists that the speakers of the original Indo-European language hailed from the Indian subcontinent. Ancient DNA researchers themselves were accused of engaging in an undignified “bone rush”, and disrespecting indigenous remains.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/26/science-advances-genetics-ai-attacks-politics