Science Fraud & Bias, Immunity to COVID-19

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 16 July 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Science is all about self-reflection. Scientists constantly check themselves, share their work, and check each other’s data. But how robust is the science upon which civilisation is built, the science which has mapped genomes, cured diseases, split atoms and sent people to the moon? Adam talks to Stuart Ritchie, a psychologist from Kings College London, about his new book Science Fictions which explores everything from biases and human fallibility, to outright fraud. He also talks to microbiologist turned image sleuth, Elisabeth Bik, whose work is revealing that manipulated images appear in scientific papers shockingly often. Now we are several months into the COVID pandemic, scientists are beginning to share their first insights into whether people retain immunity to SARS-CoV-2 after they've had the disease COVID-19. At Kings College London, Senior Lecturer in Infectious Diseases, Katie Doores and her team tracked the antibody levels over the first months after infection with COVID-19. Their first preprint findings suggest a worrying pattern – antibodies against the virus begin to wane within months of being infected. However it is too early to say if and when a person who’s had COVID-19 could be vulnerable to reinfection. Early findings from Marcus Buggert, at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, suggest that another part of the immune system, the memory T-cells, are active in those who have had the disease, even if they lack antibodies against the virus. Producers: Beth Eastwood & Fiona Roberts

Transcript

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0:45.0	Hello, this is the podcast of Inside Science,
0:48.0	first broadcast on the 16th of July 2020.
0:51.0	I'm Adam Rutherford.
0:52.0	Now, science is all about self-reflection. We constantly check ourselves, share our work, check each other's data, and that is one of its strengths. That is how we map genomes, cure diseases, split atoms and send people to the moon.
1:04.4	But on today's inside science we are asking how reliable science really is.
1:09.2	You see, science is done by people and people are not perfect they come with biases and
1:14.3	prejudices and personalities and personality defects and occasionally we cheat or
1:18.9	lie to get ahead today we're doing some self-reflection of our own soul searching and hand-ringing to find out how and why science goes wrong,
1:29.0	why big sexy results are often not what they claim to be, why that matters, and what we can do about
1:34.4	it. We'll be talking to science detectives who trawls through published work seeking out fraud, and
1:39.2	you will be shocked at how often it happens.
1:43.0	Later on, we're also going to be talking about new studies on the long-term immune response to COVID-19,
	...

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