TL;DR Shorts: Professor Venki Ramakrishnan on Trust in Research

21st January 2025

In this week of political change, today’s TL;DR Tuesday theme is trust, in research and beyond. Venki Ramakrishnan, a Nobel laureate and former President of the Royal Society, now Group Lead of the Structural Studies Division of the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology shares his thoughts on the challenges we face and suggests some solutions to help us overcome them.

Venki Ramakrishnan shares his thoughts on trust in research and in society, and how a collective, community solution could counter the negative impacts of misinformation. Check out the video on the Digital Science YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/lOXYG9JGxok

Venki breaks his thoughts down into two categories, the first of which is around general integrity in research. Measures of robust research include whether published research is sufficiently detailed that someone could perform the experiment and observe results that reproduce the reported research outcomes. This is just one measure to help determine the quality of research being conducted and is a core tenet of peer review, by peers and competitors who would be able to expose any issues in the research. There is also the conscious or unconscious cherry-picking of observations, which can again be mitigated through community consensus and conversation. If something is proven to be wrong, this consensus can be challenged and eventually help shift our understanding of the problem.

However, Venki also discusses the much bigger and more pervasive issue of misinformation, which goes beyond the scientific community and impacts all aspects of our lives, including politics, behaviour, economics, and more. Many threads of life are susceptible to the negative impacts of misinformation, which is being accelerated further by the ease at which information can be shared, and the contribution that AI is making to the volume of misinformation available in the wild.

Venki encourages us to be alert and involved as a society in combatting misinformation through robust critical thinking, to help prevent the spread of incorrect information that could otherwise go on to misinform policy and processes that impact us every day.

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