“I trust people who are wealthy,” said a participant in a focus group that a colleague and I recently ran to understand how people place trust. This was, to me, a surprising response – but on reflection, and following reactions to recent headlines, I think it speaks to something real about the priorities people have today.
żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ last week that the genetic-engineering start-up Colossal Biosciences had “” the long-extinct dire wolf is evidence of this trend. The private company, which is at over $10 billion, claims that, after altering 20 genes (of approximately 20,000) in existing grey wolf DNA, its researchers have “de-extincted” this ancient species. “After a 10,000+ year absence, our team is proud to return the dire wolf to its rightful place in the ecosystem,” Colossal on its website.
Yet despite from established biologists and geneticists that the modified animals are just grey wolves with a few alterations, some major media outlets have that the dire wolf is no longer extinct. This raises the question of whether, if Colossal were a small start-up with a low valuation and consequently lacked a massive public relations machine, science journalists and the wider public alike would have been more sceptical about the firm’s claims.
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If the answer is yes – which I think it is – Colossal’s recent coverage points to a much bigger issue in how scientific discoveries are disseminated today: a societal readiness to trust scientific claims that bolster valuations even when the research doesn’t warrant it. While people working in the sociology and philosophy of science often talk about how the relationship between scientists and the public determines trust in research broadly, when it comes to private companies, that connection is murkier. Communications teams, science writers, podcasters, bloggers, social media posters, and scientists, play a role in how we determine what the truth is – and consequently the monetary value of the science itself – with public relations specialists now an outsized role in this process.
Such claims by privately funded researchers aren’t limited to the world of cloning. Many physicists about Microsoft’s claims that it has reached a major milestone in quantum computing – producing “topological” qubits, which would vastly reduce error rates in these hyper-fast computers. The US Food and Drug Administration recently Bristol Myers Squibb, a pharmaceutical company partly specialising in oncology, for what it deemed to be misleading claims about the efficacy of one of its anti-cancer drugs on the company’s website. (And don’t get me started on the multitude of assertions that large language models are going to solve just about all the world’s problems.)
Yet none of these concerns seems to have stopped major media outlets from echoing many of these companies’ claims, with the consequence that the bar for rigorous interrogation of evidence on the part of both journalists and consumers appears to be lower when those making the claims have a lot of money – perhaps because more funding permits wider promotion. This is despite one expert’s estimate that as many as 20 per cent of studies published even just in the well-endowed area of health sciences are fraudulent – leading a former editor of The BMJ, Richard Smith, to that rather than making the assumption that all the research has been “honestly conducted”, we start from a place of caution.
My guess is this is the best attitude to most claims in science more broadly, and especially those from private companies that are hesitant to make their work publicly accessible (which includes Colossal Biosciences). If our focus group member who trusts in wealth speaks for many of us, it is probably a good idea to remember that wealthy people and companies have reasons for seeking our trust – and to heighten our scepticism when our trust is sought.
Jonathan R. Goodman is a social scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the author of , out in June.
