Whoever Got There First

Yesterday, the University of Leicester published a troubling finding about biomedical research. Antibodies are the tiny molecules scientists use to find specific proteins inside cells and tissue – a basic, everyday tool in labs around the world. Researchers took 97 antibodies already known to be faulty, and traced them through 785 published studies that had used them. Only about one in six of those studies showed any proof the antibody had been tested before use, and that’s counting just the ones where it was even possible to tell. The rest, some 640 studies, had used those unconfirmed antibodies on at least 8,064 animal samples and 4,424 samples of human tissue. The researchers believe millions of samples have been wasted the same way across the wider scientific literature.¹ This doesn’t mean the results are wrong. It means we often don’t know whether they are.

»Science is supposed to be a machine for checking things, but nobody can check everything«

Polymath Isaac Newton once wrote that if he had seen further than others, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants.² The line is inscribed around the edge of Britain’s two-pound coin, passed hand to hand by millions. It’s one of the most comforting sentences in the history of ideas: each generation reaches a little higher because the people beneath are solid enough to bear the weight. But the quote quietly assumes something it never states – that someone, at some point, checked the shoulder. What happens if nobody did? And once enough of us are standing on it, would we even be able to tell?

Science is supposed to be a machine for checking things, but nobody can check everything. A researcher reaching for an antibody doesn’t start by establishing from scratch that it works – someone else has already used it and published the result. At some point checking becomes unnecessary. That’s not a flaw in science, but a basic principle of how civilisation works. The sociologist Niklas Luhmann distinguished trust from confidence.³ Trust is a conscious acceptance of risk: I can’t be certain, but I proceed anyway. Confidence is quieter: this is familiar enough that I expect it to hold. We don’t decide to trust the shoulder every time we approach it. We just start climbing.

That’s where the comforting version of Newton’s image starts to fall apart. We assume a claim becomes a giant because it was solid, and was then stood upon. But maybe it’s the other way: in practice a claim becomes solid once enough people have already chosen to stand on it. The sociologist Robert Merton named this pattern the Matthew effect – recognition breeds further recognition, no matter the underlying merit.⁴ A finding with one citation is a claim. A finding with a thousand citations starts to look like a part of reality, because so many people already behave as though it were. The citations become armour around the original evidence, and from the outside, a well-armoured claim and a well-tested one are hard to tell apart.

That’s the uncomfortable thing the Leicester study shows. Not that scientists are careless – this is a perfectly rational system turned irrational through repetition. Researchers use antibodies because they’ve been used before – and why not, when previous use is evidence? But that evidence becomes circular when everyone stands on a shoulder because everyone else is already on that shoulder. Nobody is asking if the shoulder really holds. Everybody is checking that the researchers around and above them haven’t fallen off yet, and that’s not the same thing, even if it feels identical from inside the crowd.

A good system needs more than ways of establishing knowledge. It needs ways of reopening it. Philosopher Ian Hacking argued that things in science earn the right to be called real when they keep behaving the same way under repeated, independent manipulation, whether or not anyone wants them to; when they resist you rather than simply agreeing with you.⁵ That’s precisely what validating an antibody is supposed to test.

A bridge gets re-inspected on a schedule. A giant’s shoulder, once enough people are standing on it, essentially never does. The antibody case is the exception: someone climbed back down and asked whether the giant’s shoulder still fought back the way it was supposed to. It turned out that 84 per cent of the time, nobody else had bothered to do the same. There was nothing underneath but the weight of everyone who had already decided to stand there.

Having moved between millions of hands, the words on the two-pound coins are almost worn smooth – proof that a sentence can keep circulating long after anyone stops reading it closely. Perhaps that image is more true than the giants. We aren’t climbing on shoulders that were tested and found solid. We’re passing something hand to hand, trusting its value because it has already changed so many hands, and calling the result knowledge.

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