Nocera’s failure to mention the Restoring Gold Standard Science Executive Order is a shocking, glaring absence. And it is essential to depoliticizing the story of scientific integrity.
It would have been strange to read an article in the 1980s about Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika reforms that didn’t mention the Cold War or Ronald Reagan or Star Wars or Afghanistan, and just chalked what was going on in the USSR to internal reform dynamics in the Communist Party.
That’s what it feels like reading Joe Nocera’s “Science Has a Major Problem” at The Free Press. He presents the science fraud problem as something that’s just a matter for internal reformers to deal with—never mind that some of the “internal reformers” may themselves bear responsibility for complaisance about fraud. Nocera doesn’t mention the severeral critiques of scientific integrity, he doesn’t mention the political dimensions of this struggle, and he doesn’t mention the link between scientific fraud and the broader irreproducibility crisis of modern science—the improper research techniques, lack of accountability, disciplinary and political groupthink, and scientific culture biased toward producing positive results. Nocera misses so much that what he does write amounts to a whitewash on the true state of American science.
Nothing that Nocera says about scientific fraud is new—and he does not even hint at the existence of books on the subject including Nicolas Chevassus-au-Louis’ Fraud in the Lab The High Stakes of Scientific Research (2019), Stuart Ritchie’s Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth (2020), Geoffrey Webb’s Error and Fraud: The Dark Side of Biomedical Research (2021), Charles Pillers’ Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s (2025), and Csaba Szabo’s Unreliable: Bias, Fraud, and the Reproducibility Crisis in Biomedical Research (2025). A journalist doesn’t have to cite the scholarship the way an academic does, but Nocera is somewhat ingenuously self-serving when he mentions nothing of the rather large bookshelf by his predecessors who have written on scientific fraud.
Had Nocera mentioned them, he might also have mentioned one of their major conclusions: that the scientific integrity crisis is part and parcel of the larger irreproducibility crisis—which is of a large enough scope that (as John Ioannidis famously wrote in 2005) a majority of recent published scientific research is likely wrong. The procedures of modern science that encourage sloppiness and what charitably may be judged as honest mistakes also provide concealment for outright fraudsters. Departments, journals, and government agencies that are negligent about double-checking careless and incompetent work are, in consequence, culpably negligent at allowing scientific fraud to become routine. Scientific fraud is an opportunistic infection; the underlying, systemic debility is the irreproducibility crisis.
And the irreproducibility crisis has a political dimension. Politicized groupthink fast-tracks the publication of irreproducible results, inhibits the publication of contrary evidence, and creates rigid, false presumptions of consensus. Nocera hints at how this process occurs in Alzheimer’s research. But there is strong evidence that it affects more politically contentious fields, with profound effects on government policy, including environmental epidemiology, nutrition epidemiology, public health policy, and implicit bias psychology. Nocera’s carefully curated selection of topics affected by scientific fraud includes no politically contentious subject matters.
This curation directly affects some of the protagonists of Nocera’s article. Nocera presents Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of Science, as “part of the movement to bring quality control to science.” But Science itself has been culpably negligent in its procedures regarding scientific fraud, notably in its acceptance of a 2016 article by Oona Lönnstedt and Peter Eklöv on how microplastic particles harm fish larvae, which subsequently turned out to be fraudulent. To my knowledge, Science has never acknowledged that it failed to follow its own science integrity procedures to require underlying data when it accepted the Lönnstedt and Eklöv article, much less instituted scientific integrity procedures to prevent a repetition of that failure. Thorp arrived at Science in 2019—too late to be held responsible for the initial acceptance of the article, but early enough that he may be held responsible for seven years of Science’s non-feasance in fessin’ up to its failures in accepting the Lönnstedt and Eklöv article.
And Thorp certainly knows about the Lönnstedt and Eklöv article, since I button-holed him about it at a Cato Institute event he was speaking at in December 2019. Speaking soothingly, as important people do when they are button-holed by less important people at public events, he promised that he would look into the matter. If he did, nothing has emerged from Science. Well, he is a busy man with other priorities. But it takes willful credulity on Nocera’s part to present an organization man such as Thorp as a hero of scientific integrity.
Brian Nosek is a hero of the scientific reform movement—his Center for Open Science is a major resource for combatting both irreproducible research and scientific fraud. But even heroes have feet of clay—and Nosek’s is his unwillingness to publicly address that his own field of scientific research, implicit bias psychology, has been subject to sustained and devastating criticism of its replicability. It is to Nosek’s great credit that the largest repository of articles criticizing implicit bias psychology is hosted at the Center for Open Science’s Open Science Framework. But Nocera’s soft-focus presentation is far from the whole story.
Nocera’s story, above all, is the story with the politics left out. Science presumably published a microplastics fairy tale without checking because the journal and its staff have swallowed the Kool Aid and support environmental activism. Implicit bias theory goes unchecked because it provides a pseudo-scientific justification for discriminatory identity-politics laws and regulations.
Then, Nocera blandly mentions that Jay Bhattacharya is the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—without mentioning that the reason he is the director is because he was a heroic dissenter against politicized groupthink on COVID-19 public health policy, a politicized groupthink that led to extensive abrogations of American free speech, illiberal regulation, and unnecessary harm inflicted on the American economy.
One might multiply ad infinitum politically charged topics that have been the subject of irreproducibility crisis critiques, including climate change, air quality, COVID-19, the linear No-Threshold (LNT) dose response model. For all of these topics, scientific fraud also is a live possibility—not least because the inability to check for error also precludes the ability to check for fraud. One should not levy charges of scientific misconduct lightly. But neither should one frame an issue so that it is impossible even to consider whether scientific fraud might have occurred in any politically contentious field.
Nor should one write about scientific misconduct without mentioning the sustained federal government efforts to address the problem—which matter both because the federal government uses science to inform regulation and because its grants provide the largest single support for American scientific research. Beyond the sundry minor regulatory improvements undertaken since the Obama administration, the Trump administration published on May 23, 2025 the Restoring Gold Standard Science Executive Order—which includes lengthy material on strengthening scientific integrity and preventing scientific misconduct. This Executive Order presumably is informing a host of changed regulatory procedures as we speak, which we may expect will alter profoundly the procedures of American science.
Nocera’s failure to mention the Restoring Gold Standard Science Executive Order is a shocking, glaring absence. And it is essential to depoliticizing the story of scientific integrity. A story with the Executive Order makes clear that the irreproducibility crisis and the scientific integrity crisis are intimately linked. It also makes clear that the Thorps and the Noseks are at best one narrative strand in the story—and perhaps only a subplot. Left-liberal scientists blind to the corrosive effects of their politicized groupthink are incapable of carrying out the reforms needed to address the irreproducibility crisis and the scientific integrity crisis.
This article was originally published by RealClearScience and made available via RealClearWire.
