Offline: The urgent need to rehumanise science

Abstract

Over dinner last week, a friend turned to the subject of methods (pitiable, but true). He had just been lecturing about how to make epidemiology more meaningful. The two-by-two table was a wonderful creation, but it may not be well adapted to understanding the hypothetical causes and associative consequences of poverty, war, or climate change. Making connections between seemingly disparate settings and events—in other words, interpreting the complexity of the world—was the chief challenge for the health sciences today, he suggested. Describing our world as truthfully as one can (and using those descriptions to accelerate its change) is one of the founding ideals of the scientific Enlightenment. The notion of a “scientific method” is core to that ideal. Anyone motivated by a wish to use science for public good should therefore be obsessed by method. But the science of health and wellbeing has evolved into an often arid, brutalising, and inhuman force (notwithstanding my friend's efforts), devoid of understanding about the experiences of communities and lacking sensitivity to explain the predicaments of individuals. The recent deaths of two writers illustrate the need to reanimate science with the authenticity of humanity. Michael Herr died on June 23, 2016. Between 1967 and 1969, he was a war correspondent for Esquire magazine. His most important book was Dispatches (1977), which more than any other piece of writing changed the way Americans viewed the dexedrine-driven, “psychotic vaudeville” of the Vietnam war (“that silent tolerance for misery that made so many Americans uneasy”). His subject was death, “which of course was really what [Vietnam] was all about”—death's impersonality and the way the press “never found a way to report meaningfully” about it. Herr anatomised death in ways few other writers, let alone scientists, have done: “the grey-blue fishbelly promise of death that would spread upward from the chest and cover the face”; “some horrible light that seemed to recede, vanishing through one layer of skin at a time and taking a long time to go completely”. Elie Wiesel died on July 2, 2016. He reflected that if in his lifetime he could have written only one book, it would have been Night (1958), an account of his journey from the Hungarian ghetto through Auschwitz-Birkenau to Buna, and finally to Buchenwald. His subject too was death, and the indifference of the world to it—”How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent?” His story is short, but succeeds in conveying the extraordinary slowness with which depravity unfurled itself. Every page is a new scene of horror, of “damned souls wandering through the void”. “Death enveloped me, it suffocated me. It stuck to me like glue. I felt I could touch it. The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me.” “Death, which was settling in all around me, silently, gently.” “I tried to distinguish between the living and those who were no more. But there was barely a difference.” Neither Herr nor Wiesel were physicians or scientists. Yet both were concerned about the use of writing—the descriptive testimony of someone who was there—to change attitudes towards their subject. For Herr, “I was there to watch”. That position as observer held acute ethical duties—”You were as responsible for everything you saw as for everything you did.” Herr's conviction was that standard war reporting (“that uni-prose which all news magazines and papers maintained”) “would somehow be lost in the wash of news”. “Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding, taking its most obvious, undeniable history and making it into a secret history.” Wiesel put it this way in his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: “Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere…I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.” Science and its methods have made incalculable contributions to human welfare. But their increasingly desiccated forms are widening the gap between human reality and public understanding. This disconnection between science and humankind has stripped the moral urgency from scientific inquiry. Reading Herr and Wiesel reminds us why writing (and scientific writing too) matters—to illuminate the darkest corners of human injustice and to offer tentative prospects for remedy and redemption.