We need backup now

It is not uncommon for Hollywood to cast scientists as heroes – think Jeff Goldblum’s all-action chaos theorist in Jurassic Park.

You might think that this is hard to live up to in reality, and the bit where he lures a T. rex away from a car containing two children would be hard to replicate.

But the scientific heroism explored in our cover story is almost as dramatic, packed with examples of resilience and fortitude from researchers who have challenged the interests of big corporations or taken on pseudoscience activists in emotive areas where misinformation abounds.

As a result, some have faced multimillion-pound lawsuits, others calls for them to take their own lives. They have stories of smear campaigns designed to take a hatchet to their professional standing, and even long investigations by their own employers.

Their crime? Following the scientific evidence without fear or favour.

One might argue that scientists are well set up to cope with such pressures.

A career in science demands resilience and fortitude in any case – it is intensely competitive, highly pressured, and the scientific process provides a framework to follow, and a scaffold to lean on, when the going gets tough.

But science is also built on the idea of collaboration and shared enterprise, and in many of the cases we highlight, a striking feature is how alone the scientists concerned have found themselves when the attacks begin in earnest.

Among those we speak to is Bambang Hero Saharjo (his middle name is coincidental), professor in forest protection at IPB University in Indonesia.

He is the winner of this year’s John Maddox Prize, an award from the advocacy group Sense About Science and the journal Nature to individuals who have promoted science in the face of adversity.

His work tracing the corporate interests behind devastating forest fires, and the legal action and intimidation that stemmed from his vital contribution both to science and the fight against climate change, left him isolated, particularly from scientific colleagues associated with the palm oil industry.

But “as a scientist, I cannot let this kind of activity and environmental destruction occur,” he tells us in an interview. “As academics, we should say the truth and do the right things to solve the problem, not become part of the problem.”

Of course, just confronting vested interests with the scientific evidence won’t necessarily change behaviour or minds. The Maddox prize, and the travails of its winners, are a reminder that science and its findings do not exist in the neutral, untainted environment of the laboratory, and that the world itself is increasingly polluted by misinformation and irrational behaviour.

In this context, the findings in our news pages about the tiny fraction of spending on climate research that is going to the social sciences are of particular significance.

According to a study by the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the University of Sussex, of £1.3 trillion in research funding around the world between 1990 and 2018, 4.6 per cent was spent on climate research, but just 0.12 per cent on how society might mitigate its effects.

If this was ever reasonable, it isn’t now as the world literally burns – as Rachel Kyte, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University put it in a recent Times Higher Education interview, “tomorrow came today”.

Science communication has improved dramatically in the past decade, particularly in the UK, and the investment of time as much as money in this area has been valuable.

Speaking at the THE Live event in November, Kevin Fong, a leading science broadcaster, made the point that “public engagement used to be almost a pejorative term, but…we can’t any more operate with this idea that universities are the factories that manufacture knowledge and someone else is going to export that for them effectively.”

But providing robust, front-line support to individuals when they are targeted in the way that many of the winners of the Maddox prize have been must be a core commitment alongside that.

Their stories show that too often our heroes are being left to fend off the corporate T. rex or the pseudoscience velociraptors single handed. They deserve better – without them, we might be on the road to the next mass extinction.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com