Thank You For Not Smoking - Episode Three

This is the Trust Trace, a series about scandals and controversies that have impacted our trust in science. I'm Shane Bergen, I'm a physicist and a science communicator. In this episode, we look back at the actions of the tobacco industry and the scientists that they co-opted to deny and to create doubt around the harm tobacco causes. It's been known since the 1950s that tobacco causes cancer and other illness. The public health response to this reality was, however, delayed by bad actors including scientists who were willing to lie. As a scientist, I'm fortunate to work in a profession that enjoys strong public trust. This trust is dependent on me and all my peers working ethically and with integrity. What happens then when scientists abuse that public trust in science? I spoke to Naomi Oreski, a professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences. She's the author of numerous books in this issue around science and society, including merchants of doubt, a book on how scientists obscured the truth around tobacco. I began by asking her what roles scientists played in aiding tobacco companies. Well, disinformation really relies upon having people to speak who appear to be credible. So if we cast our minds back to the 1950s when the scientific evidence that tobacco was deadly began to really coalesce. There was earlier data, but by the 50s it was starting to be pretty much unequivocal. The tobacco industry got really scared. They realized that if word got out and if consumers understood and if governments understood how truly deadly this product was, there would be momentum both for people to stop smoking but also for governments to control tobacco. You know, if you were to follow a busy doctor as he makes his daily round of calls, you'd find yourself having a mighty busy time keeping up with him. Time out for many men of medicine usually means just long enough to enjoy a cigarette. Doctors in all branches of medicine, they were asked, "What cigarette do you smoke, doctor?" Once again, the brand-named most was. Yes, according to this repeated nationwide survey, more doctors smoke than any other cigarette. Knows, throat, and accessory organs not adversely affected by smoking. First such report ever published about any cigarette and it applies only to. A responsible consulting organization reports this study by a competent medical specialist and his staff on the effects of smoking. A group of people smoked only for six months in their normal amount, 10 to 40 a day. Forty-five percent of the group have smoked from one to thirty years for an average of ten years each. At the beginning and end of the six months period, each smoker was given a thorough examination including x-rays. The examination cover the sinuses, nose, ears, and throat. After a thorough examination of every member of the group, the medical specialist stated, "It is my opinion that the ears, nose, throat, and accessory organs of all participating subjects examined by me. had adversely affected in the six months period by smoking the cigarettes provided." Tens of thousands of doctors, general practitioners, surgeons, specialists, doctors in every branch of medicine were included. And according to this nationwide survey, more doctors smoke than any other cigarette. Try to yourself, the cigarette so many doctors enjoy. And so they developed a conscious and deliberate plan working with the PR firm, Hilah Nolten, to create disinformation, to create confusion, to manufacture doubt. And the phrase "mergence of doubt" comes directly from the tobacco industry's own documents in which they sell. There's a famous, famous document in which they say doubt is our product. Consciously trying to create doubt, confusion, uncertainty about the harms of their products, so that people will keep on smoking and governments won't take strong steps to control it. But the tobacco industry understood that if tobacco executives stood up in public and said, "Oh, our product is fine," many of us wouldn't believe that because we would know that they had an obvious conflict of interest. But if they could get scientists to say that, that was a whole different matter. And if they could get scientists to say that, they could create the impression of controversy, create the impression of a scientific debate. And what they realized was they only needed a handful, because if you think about how the media works, the media doesn't do reviews of peer-reviewed scientific literature. As an academic, I do that. The media finds someone to talk about a problem, and then they find someone else to present the other side of that problem. Tobacco industry realized that if they could simply recruit even a handful of scientists to be on their side, they could create the impression of a scientific debate in contrast to the reality, which was a scientific consensus. And that was the key strategy that they developed. So in our book "Mergens of Doubt," we identified four key people who played a role in this story, two of whom worked directly with the tobacco industry, and all four of whom then took the tobacco industry strategies and applied them to other issues. The most salient for us today is climate change. I'm really curious to know why scientists did this. How do they approach them? And what do they offer them? It's much more sophisticated and therefore more nefarious than some people might think. So it's not simply a question of finding scientists and say, we're going to pay you bucket loads of money to do this. It's a lot more subtle than that. It begins back in the 1950s by the industry identifying scientists who, for whatever reasons of their own, are reluctant to accept the scientific evidence. And so one of the earlier scientists who worked with the tobacco industry in the United States was a man named Clarence Little, CC Little. Little was a eugenicist. He believed strongly in the genetic basis of just about everything, including the genetic basis of chronic diseases like heart disease. And so when the evidence began to mount that cigarettes smoking caused these diseases, Little was very reluctant to accept that evidence because of his genetic determinism. The tobacco industry realized that this was great that they could form a partnership to argue for the genetic causes of chronic disease. And Little would work with them because that is what he actually believed. So that so a lot of the strategy was to find people who for reasons of their own had scientific views that were helpful to the tobacco industry, even if initially they had nothing or little to do with tobacco. Now another example was a fellow at the US National Institutes of Health who worked on radon and who was a big proponent of the evidence that radon caused cancer lung cancer. Now again, he really believed that that was true. And he was right. It is true. radon does cause lung cancer. And he felt that this America as a whole was not paying enough attention to the hazards of radon. So when the tobacco industry came along and said, oh, we'd like to help you. We think your work is great. We think you're quite brilliant and wonderful. And we'd like to promote your work on your behalf. And so he says, well, sure, of course, because in fact, his work is true. And it is correct. And he doesn't either he doesn't realize or he doesn't mind. And this is a part I don't really have the evidence to pin down exactly. But we know that the tobacco industry did a lot to promote his work because if they could convince the American people that a lot of lung cancer was caused by radon. And some lung cancer is in fact caused by radon. Then it would distract attention or deflect attention away from tobacco. And so the strategy one find people who are doing work that it may or may not be right. I mean, I think, you know, in my opinion, little was wrong about genetic determinism. The other fellow we're talking about, I think it was right about radon. But it doesn't matter to the tobacco industry. They don't really care whether these people are right or wrong. They just see that they can forge an alliance. Now another strategy is to find lonely and underfunded scientists who feel underappreciated and in the documents we found explicit discussion of this strategy. So all scientists need that need money to do their science research is expensive. Science is competitive and often it's hard to get money for your research, especially if you have an idea that maybe it's a little unusual, a little quirky people are a little skeptical. The tobacco industry had a conscious program to identify people who were in that situation and to cultivate them to visit them to say, I'd like to come to your lab and learn more of your work. And they go and they meet these people and they say, well, we think your work is really great. We'd like to fund you and they do. Again, much of this research is completely legitimate. In fact, one of the people they funded was Stanley Prusner, the man who discovered prions and the role of folded proteins and causing disease. This was a very radical idea at the time. And he was, in fact, a kind of pioneer took a while for the scientific community to come around and realize that he was correct about this. And this is one of the biggest industries in their early on offering to fund him and they do. And of all the people that I've tried to speak to in my own life, to try to learn more. He's one of the few people who has never been willing to talk about the story because you know. think it's in hindsight a little bit of an embarrassment to him. He went on to become to become a very mainstream scientist. Now, what is the tobacco industry getting exchanged for that? Well, when they need someone to appear in court, they would call on these people. And again, we have direct concrete evidence that when there were court cases, then later on in the 1970s, mostly, they would draw on these people. They say, we would like you to appear in court. And again, it's a very, it's a subtle and sophisticated strategy. They don't ask these people to lie. They don't ask them to commit perjury. What they ask them to do is to talk about other causes of disease. So I get you on the stand. I'm the lawyer for the tobacco industry. I say, you know, Dr. O'Boyle, tell me about your work. So I understand you work on radon. Is it true that radon causes cancer? You say, yes. Dr. Prusner, I understand you work on folded proteins. Is it true that folded proteins cause disease? You say, honestly, yes. And then I say, and is it true that the scientific community has underestimated the role of folded proteins in disease? And you say, yes. And they say, so do you think that there could be that scientific community could be missing other causes of disease? You say yes. And now what's happened is you haven't lied. Everything you have said is true, but you've created reasonable doubt. And so a jury then faced with evidence that this particular person is dying from a disease caused by tobacco. Well, you know, maybe it's folded protons, maybe it's ray that maybe it's a spestus. And so then there's two more things I'd like to mention. I mean, there's a variety of strategies, but these are one of the ones that we think are most important. So a third strategy is creating bonds of gratitude. The tobacco industry gave enormous amounts of money, probably hundreds of millions of dollars to universities and medical schools all across the United States and some abroad as well. And in many cases, these had no strings attached. Here's money to support your research. Here's money to support your teaching. Here's money to support your university activities. And one of the places they did that we know is the Rockefeller University, which was one of the leading biomedical research institutes in the entire world. When the time came to get help, they reached out to Frederick Sites who had been the president of the Rockefeller University. And you know, we haven't probably liked a little help with. And again, we know from documents that this worked because Sites actually wrote a letter in which he said, well, the industry had always been extremely generous towards us when I was president of the Rockefeller University. So I thought that it would be appropriate to try to return the favor. So that's number three. And then there's a fourth strategy. And these strategies sometimes overlap. They're not entirely mutually exclusive. The fourth strategy has to do with finding ideological partners. So when the scientific evidence of the harms of tobacco began to be kind of overwhelming, the tobacco industry switched tactics to argue about freedom to say, well, look, we don't really know whether or not smoking causes cancer. But what we do know is that if the government tells you whether or not you can smoke, you're going to lose your freedom. And you really want to live in a world where the government tells you whether or not you can smoke cigarettes. And that argument was very appealing to certain people, certain ideological conservatives. Now Fred, Sites who I just mentioned was one of those as well. So in Sites's case, we have both an ideological motivation and also this debt of gratitude. Now, throwing money on top of all that, people always expect this story to be about money. And of course, there is money involved. So Sites also does get paid, although I do truly believe that wasn't his principle motivation. But I'm sure it's sweetened the pot. And again, I found one letter where he's writing to a colleague saying, well, they flew us, they flew me and my wife in the private jet. And everyone was so nice to us. And they were very nice to my wife. And they treated us well. And they wind us and dined us. So I'm sure that didn't hurt. Where science is working on the insight of the tobacco industry or did the tobacco industry just have a very good grasp of how science worked. So they certainly are aware of how science operates in part because they do their own scientific research. But also they hire professionals. You know, they hire public relations firms, they hire advertising firms. And if you think about advertising and PR, it's all about human psychology. So they're working with people whose job it is to understand how people think, how people make decisions, and what kinds of arguments and messaging are persuasive. Tobacco ads have been extremely effective over the years. The image of the doctor. And by drafting off of medical authority, the cigarette companies seek to reassure the public that their product wasn't dangerous, even though it was. And they know it to be so at the time. One of the other devices they used tread on the public's belief in science. So the cigarette industries understood this authority. So they use pseudoscience. You might see somebody who's obviously a scientist sitting with the cigarette looking through a microscope. Or a scientist with an early space program motif behind them. Or a scientist with a laboratory behind them. And very often they quoted scientific studies that were completely invalid. Often they were paid for by the industry to make a specific point rather than to ask a question. And that these were very simplistically put out as scientific findings about the safety of their tobacco product. So they don't leave that to chance. Whereas the scientific community, in my experience, mostly leaves it to chance, right? And most scientists are experts at their field, whether it's biochemistry or, you know, nuclear physics, but are not professionals or not experts on communication or messaging. And so when they try to do that, they often frankly make a hash of it. Given the many scientists working across the world, it's not surprising that some of them have chosen to act dishonestly and to intentionally mislead the public. I was curious to know why some scientists made that choice. And what it says about science more generally as a collective enterprise. So I spoke to Dr. Elizabeth Bick, who's a scientist and somewhat of a detective when it comes to fraud and science. I was born and raised and did my PhD in the Netherlands. I'm a microbiologist by training. And in 2001, I moved to the United States where I worked 15 years at Stanford, working on the microbiome of humans and dolphins. So basically looking at which bacteria we and dolphins carry in our bodies and how that is associated with health. But I also became interested in science integrity. And specifically first in plagiarism, looking for plagiarized PhD thesis and articles. And then later by accident, I found a duplicated image in one of those PhD thesises, a photo that had been used twice to represent two different experiments. And that got me thinking how often does that happen. So I started looking for papers that had images that were reused to represent something else. And apparently I have some some talents to to finding those things. And yeah, I found hundreds of them. So I scanned 20,000 papers, found 800 of those papers with duplications. And now I'm I quit my job. And I'm sort of a science integrity consultant, specifically specializing in duplicated images. You mentioned the duplicate images there. And I love that story of how you got into it. It's it's so scientific as well to the kind of the investigative approach you've used. But beyond the search for duplicated images, what other things might come under the umbrella term of scientific integrity? So there might be many things. So it could be animal or human ethics, for example, not getting the right permission, not obtaining patient's consent, or very large tumors in animals that you can see on the photos. It could be bad methods, maybe not including the appropriate control group, or comparing a very different control group to a completely different treatment group, like you you cannot compare those two if they're different in other features. It could be table duplications, could be table like standard errors or standard deviations that are way too small or unexpectedly similar. And there could be just data fabrication that you could never detect by looking at a paper. So there's and there's statistical problems. So there's there's all kinds of problems that you could see in a paper, but it's only the tip of the iceberg because there's many problems you cannot see. A person can really fake data in a way that you would never know. If you are really good, if you're a bright person, which most scientists are, you could generate data. You could include data in your paper that looks realistic, but that is completely made up. And that is a part that worries me. By looking at papers, you can only catch the tip of the iceberg. There's probably much more fraud in science than you can ever see by looking at papers. You know, as a scientist, it kind of shocks me, but also it doesn't shock me to hear that. What kind of things you may motivate scientists to do this in the first place? there's a lot of reasons that people fraud in science and so there's sort of the general scenario where most scientists feel this pressure to publish. As scientists we're we're sort of held accountable for the number of papers that we publish and it is very hard to publish negative results. So if you do research and the results are not as nice as you would hope then but you still feel that pressure to publish a paper you might be tempted then to fake results to make it look better. And there's also two specific scenarios that are sort of variants of that that I've come across in by looking at that so many papers and hearing some of the stories. So one of the scenarios is that of a person who early in their career had been very successful maybe got a nature paper or an interview or a podcast or like you know like tasted success but then they switched to slightly different research topic maybe they become a professor or so and now the research is not going very well and I feel that is a very fertile battery dish to do fraud because that person might feel they they need to live up to the expectations and they might then start to fake results. And the second scenario is that of a professor who is a bully a professor who is very demanding of their graduate students or their postdocs and especially here in the US if you are from a non-US country and you work on a visa as a postdoc which is a very common situation a lot of people come to the US and want to work at a particular university or a famous professor but if that professor is very demanding and says I want these results by Friday and you don't deliver them and there's the risk of being fired if you are fired your visa immediately expires and you basically have to go back to your home country within a week or so and you can imagine that that people then are under a lot of pressure to give the professor the results that the professor wants to live up yeah to to to make the experiment work no matter what and so the professor themselves might not actually be asking to for example Photoshop but they might put so much pressure on a on a student that they will fake results. And so I imagine that if you are like an external non-academic actor and you know you want to employ or piggyback onto the trustworthiness of the scientific process that finding those scientists who you know might like bending the rules a little bit could be quite helpful are there examples of that? Like are there is there fraud for hire? No the sure there well there's there's certainly organized fraud there are what we call paper mills which are very active in countries such as Iran and Russia and in particular in China and those are sort of organized crime organizations that will publish fake papers if you pay for them so they basically cater towards authors who need a paper and they will just sell these papers and put the researchers name on the papers and the papers are completely made up or they might be like very low quality plagiarized versions of of other articles but they're plagiarized in such a way that you wouldn't immediately notice it like all the words are changed a little bit but that sometimes makes them lose their meaning and and so those paper mills are selling papers to authors who need them and they're they're active in countries who have very strict rules about publishing it's not that people in certain places are more fraudulent or less fraudulent than in other countries but it's because national rules differ in terms of publishing so for example in China you need to publish a scientific paper if you want to become a medical doctor and medical doctors usually are not all but most of them are not really interested in research they're interested in helping patients treating patients in clinical work but they still need to publish that paper so they are faced with an impossible requirement and they will just buy a paper and see it as an investment in their career so there's there's definitely organized crime if you if you're looking in the right places I think of the analogies with organized crime as you say that in terms of not just going after the person who's on the ground and gets cost but maybe more the systematic or cultural deep reasons that that kind of stuff happens in the first place so maybe without naming names could you could you give us some examples of the the most shocking fraud that you've come across in your work I think what was most shocking for me is just the the sheer number of papers with image duplications and those paper mills I talked about earlier those those organized crimes where there's perhaps thousands of papers that are being pumped out into the scientific literature that are completely fake but there have been some some pretty impactful papers where they have been cited by thousands of other researchers where there's what I believe is obvious photoshopping and then again I report these to the institutions and and the journals and no action is taken or just a very mild correction and recently there was a case in which there was there's potential image duplication in a sort of a seminal paper on Alzheimer's disease supporting the amyloid hypothesis and I wasn't the person finding who found the duplications but I was asked by science the journal to look into these cases and and see if I would agree with them and I did and so it seemed that that particular paper that had been cited like I believe around two thousand times and sort of started the amyloid hypothesis or at least a particular line of research within that field that paper contained or appeared to contain duplicated photoshopped images and that is is a huge yeah a huge thing because this paper was never no other researcher was able to replicate those that paper and but it started it led to the start of that field and so it led to a lot of millions of dollars being poured into that research field and other people trying to replicate that paper and could never succeed so if that paper indeed turns out to be fake that would mean that it's probably millions of dollars of research money lost on trying to pursue that you've mentioned that you've contacted journals and you've been invited to take part in investigations how do other scientists perceive your work I think I'm encouraged to do my work by most scientists but the scientists whose work I criticize are usually not very happy with that you can imagine and I'm totally understanding of that because nobody likes their work to be criticized and if you're fraud and and somebody catches you yeah those those people tend to lash out and sort of try to discredit me that seems to be their their first line of defense and so there was this one particular professor in France who claimed that hydroxychloric wind was going to be a really good treatment method for COVID-19 patients so this is a microbiologist so he's he's a very well-known person in my field and had published thousands of papers actually three thousand papers which is just incredible amount of papers and so I knew him before the COVID-19 pandemic but during the pandemic he wrote this one paper president trump tweeted about it and it's sort of almost overnight changed a lot of government's decisions public health decisions on how to treat COVID-19 so this paper had a lot of flaws I thought it was a very small paper but it had also a big problems for example some people who died or did very poorly on the medication were left out of the study well of course then your results look very good so I wrote a long critical review on it and I also found a lot of other problems in in this this professor's papers and he obviously wasn't happy he posted some nasty videos about me had a lot of fans and his videos gets on youtube they get like millions of views within days and he's very influential and so I was harassed a lot on Twitter but most importantly he also filed a complaint against me with the prokureur in his city and had several press releases and youtube videos about where he said he's going to sue me and that was very threatening because I do this work as a single person I don't have any organization or institution behind me and so if somebody really sews me I might still be right but right it would cost a lot of money to defend myself and it has never really gone so far to a lawsuit this is uh over a year ago that he filed that complaint so I think he was just threatening me but it definitely is very scary to be in a situation like that your constructive criticism which is so welcome for the discipline of science how do you feel that impacts on the broader public trust or distrust in science? I do want to stress that I'm a very strong believer in science and I feel that science is the only way for this planet to deal with the big problems we're facing as a humanity or as a planet like with global warming and pandemics we need science and we need science to be good. And I hope I'm part of that. I always say when I give a presentation about my work, I'll say at the end, I don't want you to walk away from my talk thinking that all science is flawed. Because most science is, you know, science is not really like the answer. It's a process. So most science papers seem to sometimes contradict each other because we're sort of finding our way towards the truth. And I'm just looking at the bad apples and I'm showing them in my presentations and talk about them. But most science is to be trusted. So I hope that people see that science need to be self-correcting. If a person sees a bad paper that needs to be called out and we need scientists to talk about it and maybe perhaps remove that paper from the scientific literature to make science better, that sort of should be the process that science is. We need to talk about bad papers and remove them and only keep the good ones. Given what you do and given what you see, what could you offer as hope for the future? What might be all do better as scientists? I think for a general person who's not a scientist, science might come across as very confusing because sometimes scientific results seem to be contradicting each other. And this is a normal process. This is a normal part of science because every study is slightly different and so the outcomes sometimes are different. And I think that's a thing we as scientists need to be a little bit better in explaining that to the general audience. But we also need to be much better in safeguarding and safeguarding published papers. So of course there have been preprints which are not peer-reviewed and once a paper is published, even if it's just a preprint, once it's out there, it's out there and people will always cite it and it's hard to sort of connect that to the stage in which a paper is. A peer-reviewed or not, that is something we as scientists are not very good in explaining. We think we know the system when we know that but for the general audience it's sometimes a bit confusing to understand so we need to be better in stressing if a paper has been peer-reviewed or not. But even if it has been peer-reviewed, it can still contain errors as we have talked about and we need to be much faster in removing papers, retracting them or correcting them if they contain errors or fraud. But I think most importantly, the scientific publishing field needs to step up and do better quality control before they publish papers. So they basically let the authors write the papers for free and peer-reviewed them for free. But we do pay a lot of money as a scientific community to the publishers. Sometimes thousands of dollars to get these papers published and it's not for me completely clear where all that money goes to because it doesn't go to peer-reviewed because we do that for free and it doesn't go to the writers because we write the papers for free. And if you tried to explain that to, for example, journalists who would usually not write for free or publish for free, it's hard to explain how the scientific publishing field works. And some of that money that we pay to publishers should go to quality control. The disinformation used by tobacco companies is such an obvious example of how a powerful industry can co-opt scientists and scientists to mislead the public. Elizabeth Biggs' work shows the stresses scientists are under to publish work or professionally perish. And while that's no excuse for unethical behavior, I was curious to know how the pressure scientists face in making a name for themselves might make them vulnerable to industries keen to dampen public responses to scientific realities like climate change. Well, the overlaps are enormous and this was really why we wrote merchants of doubt. When we discovered that the same people who were denying climate change today had been previously involved in denying the scientific evidence of acid rain, denying the scientific evidence of the ozone hole and also denying the scientific evidence of the tobacco, the harms of tobacco, when we realized that we realized that this was not misinformation. The pattern was too big and too consistent for this not to be something deliberate. And so that was the question, was really to understand, well, what was this exactly who was behind it? And why were these people doing it? Because the scientists we studied were all very distinguished scientists. They were quite brilliant people. I knew two of them personally and I had met a third and the fourth I knew a lot about because he was such a famous person. So it wasn't remotely plausible that they were simply confused about the science. This wasn't a case of public understanding of science or scientific illiteracy. This was clearly something different. And so the point of the book was to try to figure out what it was and what we were able to show was that it was a disinformation campaign that it was mostly motivated by ideology, the ideology of the free market and this idea that if you let the government control the marketplace that then you lose your freedoms, but there's also a lot of money involved. We focused mostly on the ideology because we thought that was the more surprising part. We thought the fact that there was money wasn't really exactly a shocker. It was funny when the book came out because I did want to interview where journalists said to me very sternly, "Well, but I mean, don't you think money is part of the story too?" And I said, "Well, yeah, but I kind of thought that was a love yes." So it's both and it's the power, it's the uniting of money and ideology that makes it so powerful because the money makes it possible for the message to be really to saturate the airwaves and like today to send it out through social media. The money makes it possible to have this massive disinformation campaign. But the ideology camouflage is it makes it seem principled. And for some of the actors, it actually is principled. So it makes it seem like it's not just about money. So it's not just about the greedy, going to share the greedy fossil fuel industry. But it's about some kind of bigger, more principled question. As a scientific community, is there anything that we can do to shine a light on this when it happens? Well, I think there's a lot of things the scientific community can do. For one thing, this distinction we've just been discussing between misinformation and disinformation is extremely important. So misinformation means mistakes. I remembered M for mistakes. So misinformation is when a person says something that's untrue, but it might be an honest mistake. Disinformation is when it's deliberate. So that's my mnemonic M for mistake, D for deliberate. I found that many scientists are reluctant to talk about disinformation because it's uncomfortable. You know, it's basically saying these people are bad things and they're doing it deliberately. They might be lying. And so you're tripping motivation, which is often hard to prove, but in our case, we have proved it. I mean, we have the documents. These people wrote these documents, right? They said in their own words what they were up to. So, but I think, you know, it's uncomfortable territory, especially for scientists who don't want to get involved in anything that seems political or emotional. It's kind of emotional to say, wow, these people are lying to me. So it's much more convenient for scientists to talk about misinformation. But the problem is that is that the remedies are totally different. If misinformation consists of honest mistakes, then the standard tools that we have at our disposal, education, communication, scientific literacy, literacy, these sorts of standard tools can work and they can be effective. People who want to know the truth but are just confused can be reached with education, with better graphs, with clear language, with plain speaking. But if it's disinformation, then it's a whole different universe. And the standard tools that we have relied on, not only don't work, they can actually make it worse. Because if someone is spouting disinformation and I come along and say, oh, no, no, that's not true. Here's the truth. Now what the audience hears is he said, she said, we don't know, it's all confusing. Oh, well, let's just not do anything until we learn more, which is exactly what they want us to think. So you cannot address disinformation with the standard techniques of education. And that's very hard for scientists because they don't know. They don't know anything else for the most part with, you know, with some exceptions, right? The instincts of scientists is to want to just explain things more, give you more science, give you more data, and that doesn't work. As a science communicator, I'm very familiar with the narrative that scientists are lone geniuses who develop ideas and make breakthroughs in splendid isolation. Such a view of scientists though couldn't be further from the truth. ours is a collective enterprise where claims are tested and reviewed by periods before being accepted. This is a strength of science, a thing that makes it really trustworthy. part of my becoming a scientist was my induction into the way of working. And like many other professions it's informal and it relies on our sense of ethics and integrity. Elizabeth Big spoke of the pressures that scientists are under to perform in their jobs, or indeed to get a job in the first place. The majority of the world scientists are in precarious employment. There's a hyper competitive market that is toxic to the collective scientific culture, toxic to the very foundation of our trustworthiness. There will always be bad actors, but we can perhaps mitigate the corrosive effects of their actions on our trustworthiness by investing in institutions that build and maintain community. Things like learning societies, professional organisations, well-funded public universities and places where the public and scientists can interact. Within each of these we can work with and for each other, growing public trust in what we do and holding one another accountable. The trust race is supported by Parrottia, an EU funded project investigating public trust in expertise, grant number 8708A3. This series is produced by Sean and Morris, and you can find me on Twitter at Shane D. Bergen.