Science & Money: The Wakefield Case

Andrew Wakefield: Discredited for conflicts of interest and unethical practices.Andrew Wakefield got a lot of fame in the late 1990's for claiming there was a connection between the MMR vaccine and the explosion of diagnosed cases of Autistic Spectrum disorders (ASD's)

The science was pretty clear: Wakefield's conclusions were not well-founded.  But the anecdotal mob-scene that ensued kept alive the idea that vaccinations were related to autism.  And that naturally gave additional motivation to people disinclined to vaccinate their children.  In other words, there was a lot of reason to keep the MMR ball in play among people interested in autism.

The British General Medical Counsel struck Wakefield off its medical register: harsh stuff. 

But his "conviction" wasn't related to the content of his MMR claims but to unethical conduct.  Predictably, Wakefield characterized himself as a martyr to the truth of his claims:

In a statement after the verdict, he claimed that efforts to "discredit and silence me through the GMC process" had provided a screen to shield the government from exposure over the the MMR vaccine "scandal".

(When being caught, be sure to draw comparisons between yourself and Jesus and Socrates and Gandhi and Galileo and Martin Luther King, Jr.)

In the podcast FT Science With Clive Cookson (which everybody ought to add to iTunes and listen to regularly), Wakefield's "conviction" is discussed along with the scientific consensus against his claims about autism.

The larger issue here is of course the relationship between scientific research and the huge sums of money that are necessary to do it.

First of all, it's just as possible to overstate the frequency of unethical conflicts of interest among scientists as it is possible to overstate the pedophiliac tendencies of Roman Catholic priests.

It's also equally impossible to overstate the seriousness of it.

Scientists, like priests, are in a position of trust.  Their pronouncements and theories carry huge weight for public policy, community values, and so on.  People who put their faith still in Wakefield's research (that is, who hold to an MMR-Autism connection against the weight of the statistical, double-blind evidence) have a right to know that he concealed his financial conflicts of interest and conducted his research under a cloud that is not common or desirable in science.  This amounts therefore to science cleaning its own house.

If they don't care (and I suspect many will not), then they sort of have coming to them what they're going to get, which is a world in which they become, like fundamental evangelicalism before them, an intellectual irrelevancy more committed to a position than to truth.