One of my most cherished possessions is a handmade cherrywood salad bowl that’s never held a leaf of lettuce. It is 25 years old and gets more beautiful every year. The bowl was a gift, carved by a widower who was left to raise his daughter alone when his wife died under my care as an oncologist. My patient, who I’ll call Erica, had the most challenging form of breast cancer and I didn’t have the tools to save her life. I’ve always felt undeserving of the gift, despite doing everything I could.



Five years later, I participated in the development of a medicine for Erica’s type of cancer, Herceptin. While regretting that it had not come fast enough for Erica, I am deeply grateful for the scientific advances that mean better care for patients like her today.

Now, at the helm of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, I see how scientific breakthroughs, such as new vaccines and hardier crops, are helping to make the world safer, healthier and more equal. Life is better because of science, and in the next few decades more discoveries will further improve the human condition.

But the scientific community is nervous. Science – and specifically the scientific method – is at risk in an era of fake news, anti-expert feeling, and science denialism. Healthy scepticism is at the heart of the scientific method and scientists believe in challenging today’s knowledge to best uncover truth. But denialism is different. Denialism is the refusal to accept established facts.

The Oxford English Dictionary declared “post-truth” as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential … than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. Today, there is fear among scientists that even the best innovations will have less resonance if policies and decision-making aren’t influenced by evidence, truth and facts.

We need to argue against this in a post-fact, post-truth era. Scientists must participate effectively in the public dialogue around facts and truth. And there are three aspects of the debate that I believe are crucial for the scientific community to address so that we remain relevant: consequences, confidence and credibility.

At the March for Science in New York City, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest against an ‘assault on facts’. Photograph: Erik McGregor/Pacific/Barcroft

The best scientists and innovators are fully aware of the consequences of their achievements. Jennifer Doudna, one of the scientists behind the gene editing Crispr technology, speaks of a time when we might cure genetic diseases. Yet she is also a part of a scientific coalition that introduced a worldwide moratorium on gene edits that would be passed on to subsequent generations. When reliability for more than a billion users was at risk, Mark Zuckerberg changed Facebook’s decade-old motto from “Move fast and break things” to the less catchy “Move fast with stable infrastructure”.

We should learn from such people. It is seductive to be boastful, or exaggerate the novelty or importance of one’s work, especially given the funding challenges scientists encounter. Scientists would do better if they showed more humility. We’ll be better at assessing and solving problems – and, more importantly, understanding the impact of potential solutions – if we deepen our understanding and respect for others.

Simple, clear, jargon-free communication is essential to broadening the appeal of science

Humility is also a big part of building greater confidence in scientists. Confidence is essential if we want to be spokespeople for the truth. We want policymakers to understand and value what we say and put forth. We want leaders to encourage and favour research and policies based on evidence that has been challenged and tested.

Open sharing of data, teamwork, more dialogue and visibility when a study is negative or not reproduced, will all give consumers of science more confidence. For our part, the Gates Foundation has introduced an open access policy that enables the unrestricted access and reuse of all our funded work, including any underlying data sets, so that others can benefit from this knowledge, and to encourage collaboration and debate.

Ultimately, the relevance of scientific experts in this “post-truth” era depends on credibility in terms of trustworthiness and expertise. Conflicts of interest and publicity about scientific literature retractions, or fraud, have eroded public esteem for scientists. We’re not alone. Traditional authority figures have become diminished, with “identity” increasingly influencing people’s beliefs rather than established sources of knowledge. This “echo chamber” phenomenon is exaggerated by the algorithms of social media.

But behavioural scientists are improving our understanding of denial and the way people make decisions. This is beginning to yield fascinating insights into how it is possible to “inoculate” audiences against misinformation. It turns out that by exposing them to some of the techniques of denialism, such as cherry-picked statistics and spurious petitions, they become more resistant to believing such messages.

People also become more open to hearing the scientific or expert consensus. This is known as the cognitive psychology of debunking. It is a key tactic when a scientist confronts a conflict between science and myth. Investing in decision science and behavioural psychology, and using new insights to get the facts straight, are vital in catching up with a world where rumours spread like wildfire.

Activists on Capitol Hill during the March for Science. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Expertise in communication is one of today’s most important credibility challenges for the scientific community. Formal training in simple, clear, jargon-free communication is essential to broadening the appeal of science, and as an antidote to sensationalist reporting of scientific advances. Scientists speaking plainly about their findings will diminish the likelihood of loose interpretations.

It is imperative we get out of our bubble. Scientists who are engaged and participating in community and family life as a part of civil society will be more aware of consequences, more confident and more credible. For the world to continue to experience progress, we must value the scientific method as the ultimate way to improve the human condition. As scientists, we owe it to ourselves to fight for the truth. More important, we owe it to people like Erica, and her family, who are counting on us.

This is a condensed version of the Rede lecture delivered by Sue Desmond-Hellman at Cambridge University earlier this month.

She is the CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation part-funds some of the journalism on this site, with the purpose of making reporting on global development possible. Such content is editorially independent. All our journalism follows GNM’s published editorial code.