Arthur Caplan, The Hastings Center for Bioethics ; Gold Dust
"There has been a good deal of discussion about President Trump’s executive order calling for gold standard science to be the governing standard for the federal funding of American science. His director of the Office of Science and Technology, Michael Kratsios, a businessman with no substantive training or experience in science or engineering, issued a memorandum to all federal agencies providing guidance as to how to implement the order.
He wrote: “Gold Standard Science represents a commitment to the highest standards of scientific integrity, defined by nine core tenets: reproducible; transparent; communicative of error and uncertainty; collaborative and interdisciplinary; skeptical of its findings and assumptions; structured for falsifiability of hypotheses; subject to unbiased peer review; accepting of negative results as positive outcomes; and without conflicts of interest. These tenets ensure that federally-supported research, and research used in Federal decision-making, is transparent, rigorous, and impactful, enabling Federal decisions to be informed by the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available.”
He gave the agencies until August 22 to submit to OSTP and post on their websites reports outlining how they plan to implement gold standard science.
There are many matters to debate about the content of this memorandum, including how to determine reproducibility, what is meant by being skeptical of findings and assumptions, what constitutes unbiased peer review, and insuring a lack of conflicts of interest. But amid this vast number of trees is a forest that can’t be ignored. Trump’s executive order empowers his political appointees to ultimately validate research outcomes. Instead of independent expert reviews of research, a Trump functionary can look at any peer-reviewed work and declare it to be in violation of the President’s gold standard due to bias, some imagined conflict of interest, skepticism, or simply uncertainty.The United States has never had a situation in which political and ideological nonscientists got the last word about what is credible science. The direct political oversight of science represented in the gold standard currency is not sound. Moving determinations of what scientific evidence is to nonscientists is stepping directly toward the terrible results prior autocratic regimes produced using politically vetted science...
Politics has a role to play in determining what research budgets will be and ultimately whether sound science will be used to drive public policy. But the standards of valid science ought not be subject to political litmus tests."
