Self-censorship and ideology: a threat to scientific research

The University Ethics Observatory recently published a ticket describing the harm of self-censorship on the quality of research. No, journals should not give ideological instructions on the content of the articles submitted to them. No, researchers should not give up publishing research whose conclusions do not conform to a certain doxa. No, we must not abandon the principles ofevidence-based medicine to please a right-thinking fringe of the population. Let us remember how many philosophers and scientists had to trick the fear of censorship in order to publish their work and thoughts. Galileo, Spinoza, Descartes are the first names that come to mind, but there were so many others! Who could have written and published, until the emergence of the Enlightenment, that God did not exist? If the Springer Nature group had existed in the 17th century^e and xviii^e centuries, he would surely have published " new ethical guidelines to eliminate potential harm to believers who do not participate in the research but who might be harmed by its publication ". Replace "believers" with "human groups" and you will have verbatim what has published Nature Human Behavior.

We also denounced DEI abuses (Diversity, equity, inclusion) in American universities, a cover-up for social inequalities, mainly intended to give a certain "elite" a clear conscience and to provide positions for diversity professionals with masters in all kinds of "studies": "gender" studies, "race" studies¹ ", studies of "fat² » and others. Marx has been relegated to the antiques store, we no longer want to be interested in the living conditions of the most deprived (those who were called "proletarians" at the time) or in the establishment of a "social elevator" that is not always broken, but only in their fair representation in genomic databases. Biomedical research must be objective and not worry about pleasing... Are we going to remove obesity from the list of diseases as we did by replacing "gender identity disorder" with "gender dysphoria"?³? Obesity is a factor in premature death and requires therapeutic management, gender dysphoria⁴is "cured" by mutilations and lifelong medications... We must not play with the health of those who confide in us and please them, the Hippocratic oath forbids us to do so.

When politics enters medicine

And now in the United States, greater insanities are taking place. The new president wants to impose in a order some form of care for minors suffering from this pubertal sexual anxiety. That is not his role. A political leader, whether or not we agree with his economic or social views, does not have to give medical directives under the pretext of common sense. It is from scientific data that we establish therapeutic protocols, not from a "common sense" that is too often hypothetical. "Common sense" tells us that the earth is flat, science tells us that it is false. "Common sense" tells us that there are two sexes, science tells us that it is true. We cannot rely on our "senses" to state scientific facts, but on the analysis of our observations and experiments. In the problems posed by gender dysphoria that I follow quite closely, it turns out that the American organization producing the standards of care (standards of care) the most influential worldwide, the WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health), among other facts which discredit his recommendations supposedly based on solid evidence, committed major scientific fraud by asking experts from Johns Hopkins University to provide it with conclusions before to have carried out their expertise. That it was the President of the United States who noted this fraud as we had done before him absolutely does not prevent it from having been committed! And that it removes a large part of credibility from this organization.

Between Wokeism and Trumpism: Science in Peril

Let's not be mistaken! Trump said well (as if he had decided) that there are two sexes, male and female, but he did not declare that the earth is round, another obvious fact, simply because flat-earthers vote for him⁵. If his opponents had not fallen into the web of imbecilities about the number of sexes, which I denounced in an article⁶, perhaps he would have refrained from these boasts! But there you go, his competitor in the presidential election, Kamala Harris, had used a curious language, indicating her pronouns before her speeches, saying in an interview that one is never woke enough, asking, when she was a prosecutor, for the coverage of "gender affirmation" operations (in French: sex change) for prisoners who wanted it, while any delivery is billed at least $12 to women in labor, etc. She lost six million voters compared to the 000 election: three went to Trump and three abstained... Trump understood this well and if his voters had mostly believed in the existence of five sexes like Fausto-Sterling, he would have declared that there are five sexes! We must not confuse a scientific assertion with electoral flattery...

So it seems that we are stuck, scientists and doctors, in the pincer movement between wokism and Trumpism! On the wokism side, we have to fight against the anti-vaxxers, against the harmful beliefs spread as if for fun against the evidence of health. Some believe that one can be born "in the wrong body" and that sex is "assigned at birth" by a decision that is ultimately arbitrary.⁷; others are convinced of the benefits of so-called "soft" medicines, naturopathy, etiopathy and other nonsense; others that obesity results from the way others look at us and that "fatphobia" is a nasty sin; others that veganism is the solution to all dietary imbalances when it is a major one; others who find that the classic representation of active and mobile spermatozoa seeking to penetrate the passive and immobile ovum is atrociously derogatory for women. The reason of certain doctors and biologists seems to have deserted the world of science.

On the Trumpist side, for every sensible statement, there are ten that are not. I will not talk about the contempt for the fight against climate change, which is not a medical matter, or the incredible presidential pardon granted to rioters while Dr. Anthony Fauci's protection is removed, but I cannot fail to recall Trump's wild ideas about the treatment of Covid-19 (bleach, ingestion of a UV lamp, and even hydroxychloroquine!). The recruitment of a Secretary of State for Health opposed to vaccinations will be remembered as one of the most serious attacks on public health ever perpetrated in a developed country. Let us not get lost in justifying the nonsense of some by the ukases of others; threats to science can come from all sides, and we should have no qualms about denouncing them wherever they come from. That the most powerful will attack others is inevitable, but not necessarily a happy one. The enemies of our adversaries are not our allies: we are next on their proscription list.⁸.

I thank François Rastier, Nathalie Heinich, Vincent Tournier and Caroline Eliacheff for their constructive comments.