Commentary
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, has not been shy about his grand ambitions. He is seeking a second scientific revolution rooted in replicability, independent thinking, open inquiry, and an end to the abuse of science by interest groups. It’s a grand and inspiring vision, but what hope is there of success?
We are daily inundated with revelations about the pervasiveness of fake science. This month, another paper was retracted because the data were fake. More than four years after publishing “SARS-CoV-2 S2–targeted vaccination elicits broadly neutralizing antibodies,” the journal found that the paper included “fabricated data” and “falsified images,” the retraction note stated.
This is one of many. Clearly, many authors and academics saw the entire period as a main chance to boost their reputations by echoing a preferred regime narrative at a time when industrial interests were strongly pushing for scientific backing. It’s shocking the extent to which science went along and how the journals adopted loose standards of peer review.
A main method here was hiding the data sources. Many of them are proprietary. When they fall into the hands of researchers, they are used only with restrictions that the primary data set is not shared publicly. With that restriction in place, replicability becomes impossible. Proprietary data also introduces a moral hazard: If no one can check its authenticity, why not bend study results in a direction that is favorable to industrial interests?
This tendency was pervasive throughout that COVID-19 pandemic period. Dr. Bhattacharya had already set the standard for countering fake science with the Great Barrington Declaration of October 2020. In some ways, looking back after six years, it is surprising how calm, clear, and direct the document is, especially given the hysteria it generated.
The document merely advocated traditional public health measures for a virus they knew was on its way toward endemicity. If you get sick, rest. If it gets worse, see your doctor. If you are vulnerable, stay away from crowds. Herd immunity will come in time. In the intervening period, the worst path is panic, closure, and forced social wreckage.
Bhattacharya and his colleagues were brave for sticking their necks out at the time because few people of their status and positions in academia were willing to say what everyone knew to be true. They broke the taboo at a time when society was desperately in need of truth tellers. They didn’t march in the streets, scream from the rooftops, or mobilize whole movements. They simply used the influence they had to say true things.
And that was what made all the difference.
Now, Bhattacharya is continuing on that path with his new position as NIH head. He is advocating transparency, openness, and verification standards in science. As part of this, he has opened a new clinic focused on vaccine injury. This is a big moment for those who have carried injuries for years but have been ignored. The reason the topic is so neglected is that powerful industrial players want nothing to do with it. They want to pretend that any downsides are limited to a tiny subset of the population. Bhattacharya knows otherwise and wants to understand both the problem and possible solutions.
For now, Bhattacharya’s position on all these topics represents a minority view. He is facing down an entrenched establishment on all sides. What hope is there for success? There is some huge hope for the paradigm shift for which he is calling. Sometimes a dramatic revolution in the sciences begins in inauspicious ways, through quiet influence and a change in direction that gradually comes to affect everything and everybody.
I’ve been reading Joseph Schumpeter’s account of the life of the economist Carl Menger, who was responsible for inspiring what is called the marginal revolution in economics. This occurred in the 1880s mainly under his influence in Europe. Menger was a student of Adam Smith who had doubts about where value theory had turned in the century after Smith’s writings. It seems to be common wisdom in the profession that economic value traced to labor inputs, a conviction shared by both David Ricardo and Karl Marx.
Menger was a patient scholar who thought through this issue with extreme diligence and focus. He took note of anomalies in the labor theory of value, how masterwork paintings grow in value long after the work is done, how water can be priced higher than diamonds in a desert, and how goods and services that require huge labor inputs can end up priced at nearly zero under certain market conditions.
Menger pushed an alternative theory. The value of an economic good traces to its perceived utility at each stage of production, subject to resource availability and consumer demand. Value is not an objective feature of any good, he said, but a consequence of human valuation, which is ultimately subjective to the individual. What’s more, people value goods at the margin: Units of a good are judged based on their ready availability.
Maybe all this sounds technical and a bit boring, but the implications are massive. Marx had argued based on the labor theory of value that workers were having their labor stolen by capital because such high profits were accruing to capital owners. But if Menger was correct, the value of labor inputs and the value of capital, and the valuation at every stage of production, is ultimately driven by its final use in the production of consumption goods.
Menger was obviously dealing with pure markets in an ideal-type economic structure, one not bullied and distorted by corporatist policies, pillaging politicians, and regulatory interventions that mostly did not exist in the 1870s and 1880s. Still his observation remains valid as a foundational principle. He was not so much overthrowing Adam Smith but clarifying questions that Smith had not addressed with precision.
Menger, like Bhattacharya, was a quiet scholar with a focused task of refining a foundational postulate in economics. That said, his writings ended up causing a revolution in economic thinking, taking it out of the realm of its growing mechanization toward a humane model that elevated the individual human mind as a primary economic actor.
“Anyone who understands the inner history of scientific progress will be aware of all the tactics employed in small circles in order to gain acceptance for new ideas,” Schumpeter writes. “Menger did not know how that is done; and even if he had known, he lacked the means of conducting his own campaigns. But his powerful strength penetrated through all the jungles and triumphed over all the hostile armies. That, in the first place, was entirely his own merit.
“There is within the human soul a fine and intimate connection, not always apparent and often seemingly absent, between the intellectual energy which can liberate itself from traditional views and burrow independently into the depths of things, and the faculty of founding schools—that peculiar fascination which attracts and convinces the future thinkers.”
By the “faculty of founding schools,” Schumpeter is speaking of visionaries who see beyond existing failed orthodoxies and corruption to observe a light on the other side. They chase that light with diligence and quiet intelligence, persuading not through payouts and emoluments but the sheer power of ideas and ideals.
Reading Schumpeter’s account of Menger’s revolution reminds me of what Bhattacharya is attempting at the National Institutes of Health, following the disaster of the COVID-19 years and beyond that discredited official science.
“[Menger] implanted his principles into a whole generation of students,” Schumpeter writes.
Similarly, Bhattacharya’s second scientific revolution may end up saving science itself for a bright future.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
