Trust the science? A North Carolina native leads the way.
“Trust the science” is a great slogan, but not a very practical guide to life. Science is messy, argumentative, and can’t resolve questions of value or morality.
What we can strive for, though, is a little more respect for scientists, the earnest and imperfect people trying to shed light on hard questions and improve life for all of us. That’s what makes Sudip Parikh such a welcome voice.
As head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, it’s Parikh’s job to build trust between policymakers, scientists, and the American public. And as a North Carolina native, raised in Hickory by parents who immigrated from India to work in textiles, he knows you can’t simply demand trust. You have to earn it.
“You have to show up,” Parikh said in a recent discussion with faculty at UNC Chapel Hill, where I listened in. “You have to build those relationships ahead of time. Being from UNC Chapel Hill is not necessarily going to help you in Hickory. You have to have those genuine bonds.”
It’s been a long time since Parikh left the Old North State, but one of the country’s leading scientific advocates still speaks with a slight North Carolina accent. Years of testifying before Congress and traveling the world haven’t completely flattened his Catawba County vowels.
Parikh’s small-town roots also come through in his conviction that science and policy must work for everyone if they’re going to maintain public legitimacy. When I spoke with him for a magazine story last year, he talked about watching his parents and his hometown struggle after the passage of NAFTA and the opening of trade with China, policy decisions championed by economists and other experts who shrugged off the skepticism of workers and local leaders.
“If you don’t recognize that not everyone is benefiting, and you’re not speaking to those who aren’t, you begin to break those bonds,” he said. “You have to realize that intellect and wisdom are not concentrated on the coasts and not concentrated in universities. They are spread out over all these areas, and what’s important is having mutual respect. We can sort of lose that living in Washington or Chapel Hill, and we have to make sure we never do.”
It’s easy to mock vaccine skeptics or dismiss the mask-averse as anti-science luddites. But Parikh is alluding to something deeper, to the loss of faith in expertise and institutions that becomes almost inevitable when those experts seem to live at a distant remove from everyone else. I’m happy to get a COVID vaccine not because I fully understand the science behind it, but because I feel comfortable with the organizations leading the effort — the government agencies, the universities, the public health officials. I know people who work in those places, and I trust those people.
The more walled-off our expert class becomes, the less we can rely on direct relationships to overcome suspicion. It’s one of the corrosive effects of economic inequality and the concentration of high-level science and technology jobs in relatively few places.
Parikh is hopeful that the COVID recovery will produce some breakthroughs in the relationship between the public and the scientific world. “I have never seen so much support for additional resources in the sciences as I do now,” he told the UNC group. “And it’s bipartisan.”
He also sees the chance for a new generation of young people to get inspired about the power of science, to see the heroic work being done in their own communities to bring the pandemic under control. In the global race for new technology and new discoveries, America’s edge will have to come from educating and welcoming people from very different backgrounds.
“China has already surpassed us in terms of graduating scientists and engineers,” Parikh pointed out. “We’re never going to compete in terms of gross numbers. We’re only going to compete in terms of our diversity, pulling talent from every part of our country.”
Here’s hoping the next brilliant kid from Hickory hears that message loud and clear.