When science goes woke, we all suffer

Health researchers in Canada, and elsewhere, are facing more and more pressure to be politically correct. Those who care about science — and depend on it to inform our health-care system — should be concerned.

The pressure to infuse progressive politics into scientific research is coming from science journals and funding agencies. They are exerting influence by changing publishing guidelines and adjusting research funding policies to favour progressive views. Such measures are inappropriate because they violate academic freedom and are fundamentally unscientific.

A recent example of the pivot from science to social justice comes from the journal Nature and its sister publications. Last month, it announced changes to its ethics guidelines that allow censorship of research deemed politically incorrect.

Ethics guidelines traditionally protect individual study subjects from being harmed in the course of scientific research, but Nature’s editors hope to extend this protection to address “potential harms for human population groups who do not participate in research but may be harmed by its publication.” The journal even called on researchers to “respect the rights of non-human life, tangible and intangible heritage, natural resources and the environment.” The implication here is that science should be informed not only by evidence, but by social movements and cultural history as well.

Researchers looking to publish in the top journal will have to “carefully consider” the impact of their work on various groups of people. Authors must use “inclusive, respectful, non-stigmatizing language” in their work. They’re advised to follow the bias-free language guide of the American Psychological Association (which declared that “traditional masculinity” was harmful to men back in 2019).

This is a problem. Scientists advance human knowledge by publishing their work in research journals like Nature. It’s one thing to refuse to publish research that is racist and unscientific (such as phrenology and Holocaust denial) or use demeaning language in their articles, though it’s hard to imagine that such things would be published in a prestigious journal like Nature, even in the absence of the new guidelines.

Nature, however, is going a step further by creating a set of broad, and overly vague, guidelines that threaten to hinder legitimate research, especially surrounding topics that might be uncomfortable, but are nevertheless beneficial to society.

And publication standards aren’t the only source of political pressure researchers face. Canada’s funding agencies, which Canadian researchers rely upon, are making similar changes.

In its 10-year plan initiated in 2021, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) — a federal agency that funds the majority of the nation’s health research with about $1 billion per year — made a number of progressive commitments.

Among the specifics is a plan to redefine “research excellence” to include diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) — the typical phrase for putting critical race theory into practice. To make matters worse, the agency plans to use DEI to make funding decisions.

The plan includes some laudable goals, such as a commitment to making research more accessible to the public, but the good doesn’t outweigh the bad. As part of CIHR’S objective to lead “transformative change,” the agency will also create anti-racism and anti-ableism action plans.

If the anti-racism plan looks anything like the one developed at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, it will be loaded with the usual slate of social justice buzzwords that cry systemic racism without offering proof of its existence. If it ends up like the Liberal government’s anti-racism action plan, it could even result in bigots receiving government funds.

Some hints of what an anti-racist health research funding agency might look like can be gleaned from earlier consultations that the CIHR held with stakeholders.

The suggestions given to the agency included calls for anti-racism to be integrated into procedural standards for scientific research, the creation of funding pools for various racial groups and for research review panels to have diversity targets and DEI officers. It was also suggested that activism — via anti-racism work and DEI — should be included on the list of criteria for evaluating a scientist’s “research excellence.”

More hints can be gathered from the instructions provided to the CIHR’S advisory committees, which were created to help shape the upcoming plans. CIHR’S anti-racism committee is instructed to use critical race theory as a guiding principle, recognizing “the need to address the ways racism has been normalized in society and in the research sector (and) the ways power constructs have privileged white populations.”

By using this as a starting point, the CIHR is assuming — without providing any evidence — that racism and “power constructs” are problems that need to be fixed in the sciences. The policy redesign is centred around an invented hierarchy of immutable characteristics that can’t be quantified or replicated beyond a few census statistics. This is unscientific reasoning and it shouldn’t be used to guide scientific research.

Meanwhile, the guiding principles of CIHR’S anti-ableism committee state that, due to “systemic ableism,” non-disabled researchers limit the careers of those with disabilities — another divisive premise that appears to be grounded in ideology, rather than fact.

CIHR’S mandate is to advance health research according to standards of scientific excellence. The agency should work within the bounds of the scientific method and leave identity politics to the activists who aren’t working on curing cancer. Instead, it’s trying to change the meaning of “excellence” to include social justice activism.

It’s a lot like Nature’s change to the meaning of “ethics” — once meant to protect individuals from overreaching scientists, the concept has been broadened to prevent research that may hurt someone’s feelings.

Canada already lags behind many other industrialized countries when it come to health research and the creation of new drugs. The problem will only deepen if researchers have to factor social justice into their pursuit of the truth.

OVERLY VAGUE ... GUIDELINES THAT THREATEN TO HINDER LEGITIMATE RESEARCH.