Simon Jenkins is dismayed by reports of the lax behaviour of some scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the allegations of some stem cell researchers that their work is being held up by rivals during peer review (Scientists, you are fallible. Get off the pedestal and join the common herd, 5 February).

Conflating these stories with his ill-founded distrust of epidemiology, Jenkins paints a grim picture of science and scientists as corrupting and corruptible: "They cheat. They make mistakes. They suppress truth and suggest falsity, especially when a cheque or a plane ticket is on offer." According to him, the profession is a dangerous "clerisy" that "wants the pubic to regard its role in society and the economy as axiomatic - with no obligation to prove it."

If Jenkins aimed his rhetorical flourishes to get a rise out of scientists then, judging by the comments posted on the online version of his article, he succeeded admirably. The howls of protest are not so much from righteous anger, however, as from our frustration with his misrepresentation of the scientific process. Jenkins is an intelligent writer with an avowed love of popular science: why then does he have so little appreciation of how science really works? His closing statement betrays the scale of his misunderstanding: "Only when science comes off its pedestal and joins the common herd will it see the virtue of self criticism."

If Jenkins had talked to some real scientists, he would have discovered that very few are sitting on pedestals - the vast majority live and breathe in a daily scrum with our intensely sceptical colleagues, whom we must convince of the logic and quality of our experiments. The fear of being found wanting by your peers is a powerful incentive for exactly the self-criticism Jenkins claims is lacking. We have no experience of the "two decades of uncritical flattery" that he alleges have blunted scientific rigour. The peer-review process, unique to science, may be an imperfect mechanism for weeding out error, but it is a powerful one: this is clearly seen in the fact that most mistakes are unearthed not by journalists or sceptical bloggers, but by other scientists.

Popular science can sometimes give the mistaken impression that science is a linear progression from ignorance to glossy fact. But no human endeavour ever works so smoothly or can claim to be perfect.

Science offers us the best hope of informing society's difficult choices in an uncertain world, so it is important that knowledge is communicated accurately to the public. Scientists are not in the business of handing down incontrovertible truths. We deal in observations and theories, couched in uncertainty, to produce our best models of how the world works; it is a messy and difficult business.

Scientists could do better at communication, but we also need to enlist the help of talented writers who will take the trouble to engage with the reality of science. Mr Jenkins, we need to talk.

• Stephen Curry is professor of structural biology, and Bill Hanage is reader in infectious diseases, both at Imperial College London