Science Changes. That's the Point.

A response to today's NYT op-ed on trusting science

Happy New Year, everyone. This is our first Substack of 2026—we are breaking the seal!

I hope folks had a chance to relax, eat well, connect with loved ones, and reset.

We hosted the holidays at our house. It was messy and chaotic in every way possible, but as an only child with a once-very-small immediate family, I welcome the chaos. The kids’ perpetual squealing. The Christmas tree pines inexplicably in every crevice of the house. The excessive number of chocolates and peppermint-flavored snacks I panic-purchased at Trader Joe’s in the days leading up to Christmas. The decorations vomited all over my house, which I am dreading packing up for their 11-month stay in our attic. The endless piles of laundry.

Anyone want to take bets on when our Christmas tree will come down? You’ll lose your money if your answer begins with “January.”

I will admit that driving my kids to school today felt spiritual. I didn’t even need a second cup of coffee to motivate myself to get into my freezing cold car. I was running on the pure joy of returning to work (my happy place). On the drive home, I nearly chewed out the inside of my mouth thinking about the thousands of emails and to-do items I’m digging out of.

But while I took a breath, I read the news and stumbled upon an op-ed in the New York Times that caught my attention. Let’s discuss…

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I spend my days talking to people who’ve lost trust in science. And I don’t blame them for asking hard questions.

Today’s essay, by Elay Shech, a professor at Auburn University specializing in the philosophy of science, stood out to me because it articulates something I’ve tried to explain for years. The people who question science aren’t stupid. They’re often paying close attention. They notice when guidance changes. They remember when they were told one thing and then another. And when someone tells them “just trust the science,” it can feel like a dismissal of what they’ve witnessed with their own eyes.

They also remember history. In the 1940s, tobacco companies ran campaigns declaring “More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette.” Physicians appeared in ads assuring the public that certain brands were gentler on the throat. These ran in medical journals, in Good Housekeeping, in the Saturday Evening Post. The medical establishment didn’t sound the alarm until the evidence became undeniable, and tobacco companies continued claiming “controversy” until the late 90s.

More recently, the opioid crisis revealed real failures in how certain pain meds were marketed and prescribed. I don’t outright dismiss when people tell me they’re skeptical of pharma. But I gently point out that our ability to identify those failures, to hold bad actors accountable, to change course, that is the system working, even if imperfectly and too slowly. And I draw the distinction that corporate misconduct is NOT the same as flawed science. The evidence base for vaccines, for example, doesn’t come from any single company. It comes from decades of independent research across institutions, countries, and regulatory bodies that often have competing interests. Holding companies accountable and trusting well-replicated science aren’t mutually exclusive. They go hand in hand.

Dr. Shech calls for “disciplined trust,” and I agree, but I’d add that this requires something from scientists and communicators too. It means being honest about uncertainty. It means explaining why recommendations change instead of expecting compliance. It means not treating every question as an attack. When we get defensive, we lose people.

I appreciate that this piece refuses the false choice between blind faith and blanket rejection. There is no single “scientific method” applied uniformly across all fields. Newton’s deductive reasoning looks nothing like Darwin’s inference to the best explanation, which looks nothing like the RCTs we run in medicine today. Treating science as one monolithic enterprise that either stands or falls as a whole misses the point entirely.

I’d also push further on the pace of change. We’re living in something like dog years for science... one year of progress now represents what might have taken 70 a few decades ago. We have tools our predecessors couldn’t have imagined—gene sequencing, computational modeling, and real-time global data sharing. The mRNA tech behind COVID vaccines was built on 30 years of foundational research, but once we had the viral sequence, the vaccine itself was designed in two days. The compound interest of accumulated knowledge pays dividends.

And yes, science changes. That’s the point! We once thought ulcers were caused by stress until researchers proved it was a bacterium and won a Nobel Prize. We once thought the universe was static until Hubble showed us it was expanding. The capacity to update is not a flaw in the process; it’s the feature that makes it work.

But some people take this to mean nothing we say now can be trusted. If we were wrong before, why believe us now? The vaccine-autism claim isn’t an example of science being “open to question” in a healthy way. It’s been studied exhaustively across multiple countries involving millions of children. The original paper was retracted. The author lost his medical license. At a certain point, continued “questioning” isn’t intellectual humility, it’s selective skepticism in service of a predetermined conclusion.

Dr. Shech makes an important distinction between fields where methods are still being refined and findings often fail to replicate, versus areas where the evidence has been confirmed repeatedly through independent lines of inquiry. Knowing the difference is part of what disciplined trust requires. Science isn’t a monolith that rises or falls all at once. Neither is public trust.

Stay Curious,

Unbiased Science