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Is Science Dead? Nah… We’re Just Getting Yelled at Again, Like the Good Troublemakers We Are
It’s too early to proclaim the death of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, or medicine.
Every so often, someone declares the death of science. Sometimes it’s whispered in the halls of academia, and sometimes shouted from social media rooftops. Recently, I’ve heard more than a few people (several of them colleagues) say that science, medicine, and public health are not just in trouble. They proclaim that these things are dying. They say we’ve passed some sort of tipping point into dysfunction and distrust from which we can’t return.
But history would like to enter the chat, so to speak. We’ve been here before. And, in a way, we never left.
There was a time when people rioted against variolation, the precursor to modern vaccination. It wasn’t because it didn’t work, but because it sounded scary. The idea of deliberately giving someone a disease (in a controlled way) to prevent a worse outcome felt unnatural. Edward Jenner, who introduced the smallpox vaccine using cowpox, was accused of trying to turn people into cows. And I don’t mean metaphorically. Eighteenth-century cartoons literally depicted human faces morphing into bovine ones.
