Frances Widdowson | The War on Science Interviews | Day 10
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
Lawrence M. Krauss
4.4 • 592 Ratings
🗓️ 2 August 2025
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
To celebrate the release on July 29th of The War on Science, we have recorded 20 podcast interviews with authors from the book. Starting on July 22nd, with Richard Dawkins, we will be releasing one interview per day. Interviewees in order, will be:
Richard Dawkins July 23rd
Niall Ferguson July 24th
Nicholas Christakis July 25th
Maarten Boudry July 26th
Abigail Thompson July 27th
John Armstrong July 28th
Sally Satel – July 30
Elizabeth Weiss – July 31
Solveig Gold and Joshua Katz – August 1
Frances Widdowson – August 2
Carole Hooven – August 3
Janice Fiamengo – August 4
Geoff Horsman – August 5
Alessandro Strumia – August 6
Roger Cohen and Amy Wax – August 7
Peter Boghossian – August 8
Lauren Schwartz and Arthur Rousseau – August 9
Alex Byrne and Moti Gorin – August 10
Judith Suissa and Alice Sullivan – August 11
Karleen Gribble – August 12
Dorian Abbot – August 13
The topics these authors discuss range over ideas including the ideological corruption of science, historical examples of the demise of academia, free speech in academia, social justice activism replacing scholarship in many disciplines, disruptions of science from mathematics to medicine, cancel culture, the harm caused by DEI bureaucracies at universities, distortions of biology, disingenous and dangerous distortions of the distinctions between gender and sex in medicine, and false premises impacting on gender affirming care for minors, to, finally, a set of principles universities should adopt to recover from the current internal culture war.
The dialogues are blunt, and provocative, and point out the negative effects that the current war on science going on within universities is having on the progress of science and scholarship in the west. We are hoping that the essays penned by this remarkable group of scholars will help provoke discussion both within universities and the public at large about how to restore trust, excellence, merit, and most important sound science, free speech and free inquiry on university campuses. Many academics have buried their heads in the sand hoping this nonsense will go away. It hasn’t and we now need to become more vocal, and unified in combatting this modern attack on science and scholarship.
The book was completed before the new external war on science being waged by the Trump administration began. Fighting this new effort to dismantle the scientific infrastructure of the country is important, and we don’t want to minimized that threat. But even if the new attacks can be successfully combatted in Congress, the Courts, and the ballot box, the longstanding internal issues we describe in the new book, and in the interviews we are releasing, will still need to be addressed to restore the rightful place of science and scholarship in the west.
I am hoping that you will find the interviews enlightening and encourage you to look at the new book when it is released, and help become part of the effort to restore sound science and scholarship in academia. With no further ado, The War on Science interviews…
As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube.
Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. As many of you know, |
| 0:14.9 | my new book, The War on Science, is appearing July 29th of this year in the United States and Canada. |
| 0:21.8 | And to celebrate that, we've interviewed many of the authors of the 39 authors who have |
| 0:27.8 | contributed to this volume. And we have 20 separate podcast interviews that will be airing |
| 0:33.7 | over the next 20 days starting July 22nd, before and after the book first appears. |
| 0:40.2 | With many of the authors in the book on a host of different subjects, the authors we will have |
| 0:45.9 | interviews with in order of appearance over the next 20 days are Richard Dawkins, Neil Ferguson, |
| 0:53.3 | Nicholas Christakis, Martin Boudry, Abigail Thompson, John Armstrong, Sally Sattel, Solveig Gold, and Joshua Katz, Francis Whittleson, Carol Hoeven, Janice Fiamengo, Jeff Horstman, Alessandro Strumia, Roger Cohen and Amy Wax, Peter Bogosian, Lauren Schwartz and Arthur Russo, |
| 1:13.1 | Alex Byrne and Modi Gorin, Judith Sisa, and Alice Sullivan, Carleen Grible, and finally |
| 1:19.7 | Dorian Abbott. The topics that will be discussed will range over the need for free speech |
| 1:26.7 | and open inquiry and science and the need to preserve scientific |
| 1:30.2 | integrity stressed by our first podcast interviewer Richard Dawkins and will once again go |
| 1:38.7 | over historical examples of how academia has been hijacked by ideology in the past and the negative |
| 1:47.7 | consequences that have come from that to issues of how specific disciplines, including |
| 1:54.7 | mathematics, have been distorted and how certain departments at universities now specifically claim that they are social activists |
| 2:04.4 | and a degree in their field is a degree in either critical social justice or social activism, |
| 2:11.2 | not a degree in a specific area of scholarship, how ideology has permeated universities. |
| 2:20.3 | We'll proceed also to discuss issues in medicine. Sally Settel will talk about how social justice is hijacked medicine. |
| 2:24.3 | And also, when it comes to issues of gender affirming care, |
| 2:28.3 | we have a variety of authors who are going to speak about the issues there |
| 2:31.3 | and how too often gender affirming care claims are made that are not based |
| 2:35.1 | on empirical evidence. In fact, falsely discuss the literature in ways that are harmful to young people. |
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