What do you think about when you hear “the scientific method?" Maybe you think back to fourth grade and learning the six steps of the scientific method: 1. Purpose 2. Research 3. Hypothesis 4. Experiment 5. Analysis 6. Conclusion. Or maybe you think of the science project you did in fifth grade, where you played classical and pop music to two plants and saw which one grew faster. In any case, you probably think about facts. Science is the process of figuring out what is a fact. According to the National Academy of Sciences, a "fact" is defined as, "a scientific explanation that has been tested and confirmed so many times that there is no longer a compelling reason to keep testing it or looking for additional examples."
This isn't how most people would define the word "fact" though. For most people, a fact is something that is unquestionably true forever. Even with this different definition, it is really risky for scientists to label something as: “Fact." Everybody used to say with confidence that the world was flat. That was an actual fact. Nobody had any reason to assume that the world wasn’t flat, so people assumed that if they went too far, they would fall off the edge of the world. But it actually wasn’t a fact, it was an assumption. One that turned out to be very wrong. Now today, we can say with confidence that the world is not flat. It is a fact that we can’t fall off the side of the earth. But look at how long it took for us to be able to get to that point!
So in research, most things have to stay at the level of a theory. We gather evidence supporting one theory, but evidence that doesn’t support that theory is probably out there too. Debates rage, and not just in popularly controversial areas like evolution or geological time. And people have to be very careful about what is labeled as a fact. For a while, neuroscientists took it as a fact that it was not possible for new neurons to be formed in the brain. This seemed like a crazy thing to happen and everyone assumed it wasn’t possible. Now, we know that new neurons are incorporated into at least two areas of the adult brain, and the possibility of stem cells becoming neurons holds amazing potential to treat a variety of diseases. None of this would have been possible if some people hadn’t questioned the majority and the assumption.
As long as researchers do good science and follow ethical practices, experiments producing results is the easy part. The tricky part is knowing what those results actually mean. Sure, when you were in fifth grade the plant that heard classical music grew faster. But does that really mean all plants grow faster with classical music? First, your experimental design would have to control for all other variables, and you would need to test way more than just one plant. But even after that, all we could say was that those particular plants, in your particular yard, with one particular kind of music, seemed to grow faster. Like everything, more research would be needed to draw a more complete conclusion.
So unfortunately, this means that one little study that found a cancer cell-reducing agent that worked in rats will probably never make it far enough to be generalized to humans. It means when you hear on the news of a study that found cell phones linked to cancer, it could mean cell phones cause cancer, or it could mean people who spend a lot of time on their phone have higher rates of cancer because of other factors, or it could mean that they sampled ten people and it was easy to find a significant effect that wouldn’t hold up as soon as they sampled more people.
To sum up with a quote from my dad, "The 'Scientific Method' is 'Don't skip steps, don't make assumptions, see what is really there.'"
