Science and "Loyalty Tests"

Can we please abandon ALL of them?

On June 9, my daily email from the New York Times included a link to an op-ed that was presented as, “Science Should Not Be Subject to Loyalty Tests.” Written by Melissa L. Finucane, a professor of social and behavioral science at New York’s Stony Brook University, the guest column was actually titled, “Trump’s Assaults on Scientific Research Just Got Worse.” (1)

“A new kind of institutional vandalism appeared last month in the form of a 412-page Trump administration regulatory proposal and a comment period,” Dr. Finucane began. “If the proposal passes, it will damage one of the most rigorous, productive and valuable scientific enterprises in the world.” (1)

The major problem with this new regulatory proposal, Dr. Finucane continued, is that it would “impose restrictions on the kinds of research that can be funded and give political appointees the final authority to deny federal funding for research deemed inconsistent with presidential priorities.” (1)

This new proposal by the Office of Management and Budget weakens, according to Dr. Finucane, the strong accountability now in place within the peer review process.

“The proposal demotes peer review where expert scientists, working inside and outside the agencies, evaluate research based on the scientific merits and strengths of the underlying evidence. Instead of being ‘routinely deferred to,’ peer review would now be only ‘advisory.’ That upends the longstanding compact between the federal government and the scientific community, where Congress appropriates funds, agencies administer them and scientists (through peer review) determine which proposals represent the best science.” (1)

Hold on: Peer review has had good and bad outcomes.

If you’re a regular reader of this SubStack, you’re aware of the articles my writing partner Dr. Rebecca Culshaw Smith and I have posted here that examine how medical research, funded and published via the peer review system, sometimes goes very much awry.

Rebecca has taken a deep dive into the often-under-disclosed adverse effects of the PrEP drugs given for life to healthy people to (allegedly) keep them from contracting HIV. She is, inexplicably, the only reporter in North America who’s monitoring the potentially billion-dollar lawsuits filed against the maker and aggressive marketer of these drugs, Gilead Sciences. (2) Rebecca has also published several books on the subject of AIDS and its underlying scientific, mathematic, and medical lapses, toxic treatments, and fraudulent science. (3-5)

Over the last 40 years, I’ve written about the outright prejudice against and medical/psychological mistreatment of ME/CFS patients, as I did at The New York Native (1988-1997), and in several books. (6-8)

But back to this week in the New York Times: I agree with Dr. Finucane that no politician of any stripe should decide which scientific research should be funded, conducted or published in any field. But what Dr. Finucane doesn’t acknowledge in her guest essay is that the peer review process is already subject to an only slightly subtler form of political pressure from within the scientific establishment.

Have we already forgotten how Dr. Anthony Fauci ruled the grant-awarding process at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for close to 40 years? (9)

On SubStack, I’ve documented that some of the fraud discovered in the search for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) treatments has occurred because the discipline’s “thought leaders” are presumed to be more correct than everyone else. Not only have they created the (now questionable) AD paradigm that all other scientists must accept and recreate in their own studies—if they want to be funded and published—but AD thought leaders also receive the lion’s share of research grant monies and are often given author credits for papers into which they had little intellectual input. (10)

I’m not accusing all younger scientists of simply emulating the senior researchers in their fields, but there exists an element of hero worship that can cause not-famous researchers not to question, ever, the work done by their discipline’s leaders.

For example: I worked for a while with a scientist who’d done his postdoc in New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center lab of Dr. William T. Summerlin, who carried off the pre-AIDS era’s most breathtaking feat of laboratory fraud. Dr. Summerlin was trying to prove that trans-species skin grafts could be performed without using harmful immunosuppressant drugs. In the early 1970s, he claimed to have transplanted black fur onto white lab mice without the help of any immunosuppressant therapy. There was just one problem: No one could replicate his findings.

An article in O&G Magazine described the debacle:

“In 1974, Summerlin was exposed when lab assistants discovered that the patches on the mice could be removed with alcohol. The ‘black patches’ turned out to be the result of a black marker pen. Summerlin later attributed his deceptive behaviour to a combination of mental and physical exhaustion, and pressure to publicise positive results. As a result of the Summerlin incident, the term ‘painting the mice’ became a synonym for research fraud.” (10)

About a decade later, conversation in the lab turned to why all of Summerlin’s postdocs, including my friend, didn’t question why they couldn’t replicate the professor’s finding. He shrugged and said, “We just assumed he was smarter than the rest of us.”

This detour has taken us into one type of bias in science that’s probably existed for centuries: not questioning the famous professor, the institutional leader, or the paradigm creator because they’re thought to be smarter, more adept, downright infallible.

But in 2000, the HIV thought police took bias-by-group think to an even more absurd height: The Durban Declaration. It was named after Durban, South Africa, where the XIII International AIDS Meeting was held in July 2000.

Published in Nature on July 6, 2000, the Durban Declaration stated, in bold type:

“HIV causes AIDS. Curbing the spread of this virus must remain the first step towards eliminating this devastating disease.” (11)

The Nature publication included a couple of introductory paragraphs explaining that the “current controversy” in South Africa over whether HIV causes AIDS had created “massive consternation among all scientists, doctors and many others in the international community who treat AIDS patients or who work on AIDS in other ways. There is widespread anxiety that denying or doubting the cause of AIDS will cost countless lives if blood screening, use of condoms, and methods to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus are not implemented or, worse, even abandoned.” (11)

No similarly Stalinist-lite effort to suppress dissent would be complete without lists: Lists of those who could be depended upon to toe the party line (the Declaration’s signers), and of those who couldn’t.

“The declaration has been signed by over 5,000 people, including Nobel prizewinners, directors of leading research institutions, scientific academies and medical societies, notably the US National Academy of Sciences, the US Institute of Medicine, Max Planck institutes, the European Molecular Biology Organization, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Royal Society of London, the AIDS Society of India and the National Institute of Virology in South Africa,” Nature asserted.

And how could it not have gathered so many signatories, having an “organizing Committee” comprised of “over 250 members from over 50 countries.” (11)

All of which is to say, science’s past is not pristine; nor will its future be. But, with effort, we can correct the known biases and keep our eyes open for the new ones that cutting-edge technologies and scientific innovation will inevitably create.

And hopefully, well-meaning individuals will some day agree that curtailing originality and restricting certain areas of research—be it the structure of the solar system in the 1630s, the research use of human embryonic stem cells in the 1990s, the implacable insistence that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS in 2000, or the “incentive to prioritize loyalty to a political leader over quality,” as argued by Dr. Finucane in this week’s New York Times—is ultimately destructive to increasing our common reservoir of human knowledge.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Melissa L. Finucane. “Trump’s Assaults on Scientific Research Just Got Worse.” New York Times, June 9, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/09/opinion/science-federal-government-funding.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
2. Rebecca Culshaw Smith. “Truvada Side Effects—from Truvada users. A brief examination of the PrEP enthusiasts of Reddit.” April 25, 2024. The Real AIDS Epidemic on SubStack.
3. Rebecca V. Culshaw. The Real AIDS Epidemic: How the Tragic HIV Mistake Threatens Us All. Skyhorse Publishing, 2023.
4. Rebecca Culshaw Smith. The Truvada and PrEP Disaster. July 2024. Available on Amazon.
5. Rebecca V. Culshaw. Almost Canceled: How AIDS Activists Almost Stopped the Publication of The Real AIDS Epidemic. September 2023. Available on Amazon.
6. Neenyah Ostrom. 50 Things You Should Know About the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. January 1, 1993. St. Martin’s Press, NYC, NY.
7. Neenyah Ostrom. Ampligen: The Battle for a Promising ME/CFS Drug. June 2, 2022. Available on Amazon.
8. Neenyah Ostrom. AMERICA’S BIGGEST COVER-UP: UPDATED 2ND EDITION 50 More Things Everyone Should Know About the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic and Its Link to AIDS. March 9, 2022. Available on Amazon.
9. Joseph Choi. “Fauci sits through first 7 hours of questioning with COVID select subcommittee.” The Hill, January 8, 2024. https://thehill.com/homenews/4396265-fauci-sits-through-first-seven-hours-of-questioning-with-covid-select-subcommittee/
10. Neenyah Ostrom. “Fraud in Stroke and Alzheimer’s Disease Drug Trials—Again?Whistleblowers detect data and images in published papers that appear to have been manipulated, according to Science magazine.” November 16, 2023. SubStack. https://immuneillnessreport.substack.com/p/fraud-in-stroke-and-alzheimers-disease
11. Gerald Lawson. “Painting the mice: research fraud.” O&G Magazine, published by Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. EVIDENCE, Vol. 14 No 2 | Winter 2012. https://www.ogmagazine.org.au/14/2-14/research-fraud-painting-mice/
12. “The Durban Declaration.” Nature 406, 15–16 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35017662