Thread by @Ayjchan

Analysis by @edyong209 @TheAtlantic of the impact of the pandemic on how science is done.

I'm reading it from the POV of one of "Thousands of researchers dropped whatever intellectual puzzles had previously consumed their curiosity and began working on the pandemic instead."

https://twitter.com/edyong209/status/1338469107008679936

People have asked me why I'm so obsessed with understanding the origins of SARS-CoV-2/covid.

My answer: How could I not be?

A virus pops out of nowhere and the entire world is put out of order. This is, hopefully, the pandemic of our lifetime.

Quote: Ebola and Zika each prompted a temporary burst of funding and publications. But “nothing in history was even close to the level of pivoting that’s happening right now,” Madhukar Pai of McGill University told (Ed Yong)... “It hit us at home” theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

Hopeful that "the next time a mystery pathogen emerges" there will not only be speedier pipelines for vaccine, therapeutics & diagnostics but also more effective, transparent ways of tracing the origins of the pathogen to prevent repeated outbreaks. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

I'm going to hit this nail on the head. I know that some experts see my origins work as an example of this:

https://twitter.com/edyong209/status/1338469115359584256

However, I'm going to reinforce that outsiders and less established scientists have a critical role to play in the scientific process.

The idea of staying in one's lane is, imo, not how scientific advances happen. Scientists are driven by curiosity, continuous learning & specializing. Cutting edge science often requires branching out of one's comfort zone, collaborating with scientists in other specializations.

Academic departments often do not want to hire multiple professors who are from the exact same lane (e.g., trained in the same lab or same dogma) because this could lead to overall research stagnation and less interdisciplinary innovation.

Scientists from different lanes, swerving out of their lanes, and plowing into unfamiliar territory does make life harder for long time experts in the field - yes, blunders are made, but this process challenges current hypotheses and forces learning and scientific progress.

When scientists (and non-scientists) have reached out to me asking if they should be looking into covid, whether it's vaccine R&D or origins, my answer is never "stay in your lane".

As long as curious people are not claiming false expertise, they should be encouraged to learn.

Rather than being told to leave this all to the actual experts, people should be encouraged to evaluate the evidence themselves. Don't underestimate other scientists and non-scientists' abilities to learn and understand.

One side effect of covid is increased scientific literacy.

I know this creates a lot of work for scientists and journalists, but science communication & literacy have been undervalued for so long. Building public trust in experts/science doesn't happen just from research publications or profs dropping tweetorials.

Gonna add something that could get me in trouble: on the "bad papers helped shape the public narrative of the pandemic" - some of the most influential of these were written by established experts, who had the currency to get bad papers through peer review, into top journals.

“In the big scheme of things, I'm much more worried about the questionable research that's in the big journals about COVID than I am about what really does look like fringe." - Ivan Oransky, Retraction Watch
vice.com/en/article/jgq…

The scientific enterprise involves humans. Scientists are not robots or machines. Experts in each field have pre-existing relationships - political, financial, personal, intellectual friendships or rivalries. These competing interests affect research.

https://twitter.com/edyong209/status/1338469118819897348

On this point, making editorial and peer review public (even if anonymized) is what I believe is essential to ensuring that (1) the research x review process is rigorous and (2) the review process is fair and not impacted by competing interests.

One of the main reasons why experts have had to "debunk spurious research in long Twitter threads and relentless media interviews—acts of public service that are rarely rewarded in academia" --- is because most peer review is not published. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

That means that when a scientist/non-scientist encounters a publication, they have zero insight into the expert criticisms of that work. They need to start from scratch, or more likely rely on experts to do unpaid public peer reviews on twitter.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1335304767032221699

On key covid papers, we've already seen important addendums and editor's notes released several months post-publication - with near zero insight as to why these addendums/notes were added, the extent of concerns raised.
nature.com/articles/s4158…
nature.com/articles/s4158…

From what I can tell, inquiries leading to these addendums were not driven by established experts, but by scientists "swerving out of their scholarly lanes and plowing into unfamiliar territory" - telling journals that these papers need to be corrected.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1334868617998032896

Being described by other scientists as an opportunist, attention-seeking postdoc, wandering "deep into conspiracy land" will not stop me from investigating and asking tough questions about the origins of covid/SARS2.