Promises, promises

Tabloids are not the only ones with a flair for exaggeration; they're only the most obvious. Today, science itself has fallen prey to our modern weakness for hype. It wasn't always like this-- so what happened? Well, for one thing, scientists are not machines, they're human. So they crave a lot of the things normal people crave, like money, fame and attention, as Stuart Blackman explains in Science.  

Meanwhile, in bleaker moments, scientific authorities have predicted the end of the world and civilization as we know them at the hand of pandemics or environmental catastrophe. And yet we are still here, in defiance of Thomas Malthus’s eighteenth-century warnings about overpopulation and ecologist Paul Ehrlich’s prophesy in his 1968 book The Population Bomb that “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Of course, scientists have a strong incentive to make bold predictions—namely, to obtain funding, influence, and high-profile publications. But while few will be disappointed when worst-case forecasts fail to materialize, unfulfilled predictions—of which we’re seeing more and more—can be a blow for patients, policy makers, and for the reputation of science itself.