Hillsdale College Academy for Science and Freedom Hosts Presentation in Franklin
HILLSDALE, Mich. — Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom Fellow Jay Bhattacharya spoke at The Harpeth Franklin Downtown in Franklin, Tennessee, on March 2. Bhattacharya’s talk was titled, “Stagnation in Science and How to Fix It.”
Bhattacharya spoke on the decreasing productivity of medical research. “There’s a lot more research, more papers published, but each paper is actually creating less useful knowledge than it once did … per paper, [we are] saving fewer and fewer lives,” he said. “The reason why science is stagnated is that we don’t really tolerate failure anymore.” He observed that because of the lack of funding, younger scientists aren’t able to conduct potentially groundbreaking research while older scientists are able to kill newer ideas out of fear that their own work and reputation will be threatened. “Becoming a successful scientist takes much longer now,” he said. “It is absolutely necessary for young people to have the opportunity to test their ideas at the bottom, to have the resources to do it, not to be essentially put to work in service of older people’s ideas in science. It needs to have some autonomy.” The talk concluded with Bhattacharya noting that “Science is a beautiful thing. It is how we learn about the material world. It works best when we allow everybody to have a say, and we don’t suppress new ideas.”
Bhattacharya is a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine in the Department of Health Policy. He also directs the Center for Economics and Demography of Health and Aging at Stanford University. Recently released internal documents from the social media company Twitter revealed that his commentary on COVID-19 policy was suppressed on the platform during the pandemic at the request of the FBI.
Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom educates the American people about the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom and science in the pursuit of truth. Led by national and international scholars, its work serves to educate policymakers and the general public about important discoveries and ideas that might otherwise be ignored by scientific journals and corporate media.
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