“Nevertheless, after the smear campaign against me, I didn’t get a professorship for a few years,” he says. He certainly sees the danger that sensitive research findings could be misused for political purposes. Nevertheless, he emphasizes: “In science, the truth has the highest priority.” Even if it is sometimes confusing and catchy. However, according to Rindermann, you can forget about getting funding for this topic.
Discarded topics, ended careers
Even today, some research topics harbor a risk of alienating parts of the public. Experts are always making decisions about which of all the things in the cosmos they want to explore more closely. Some of the questions they ask themselves can mean the end of their career. Sometimes a topic is politicized, sometimes it simply collides with the zeitgeist. The social climate and changing moral concepts mean that there are systematic gaps in our knowledge of the world.
The US sociologist Joanna Kempner from Rutgers University in New Jersey (USA) has examined how political controversies influence science. She interviewed more than 80 researchers who had been publicly approached about their topic. The results were published in 2008. Around half of the participants stated that they deleted certain terms from funding applications in order to make themselves less vulnerable. About a quarter dropped certain ideas altogether. Four even changed jobs. “This shows that the political climate plays a part in deciding which questions scientists address,” says Kempner. “Self-censorship plays an important role.” Experts often don’t choose what they think is the most exciting project, but rather the one that is most popular, explains the sociologist. Previous controversies demarcated the realm of feasibility. Colleagues who have damaged their careers with a similar research project are taken as a warning.
Amelia Sharman of the London School of Economics and Political Science came to the same conclusion in 2015. She asked 30 climate researchers whether they were influenced by attacks and public criticism from climate skeptics. 24 experts agreed. Most frequently, they stated that they were becoming more careful in their statements in order to offer as little as possible a target for attack. As a result, many were less willing to appear as experts in the media.
Another case revealed the sometimes dubious role played by the press, radio and television. The renowned neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis, then director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, was researching the basics of visual perception when a secretly shot video from his monkey laboratory surfaced in 2014. A member of an activist group had infiltrated the institute as an animal keeper for six months and edited an effective video from 100 hours of material. It showed newly operated macaques, a test animal vomiting mucus and a dead primate being placed in a garbage bag. The RTL magazine “Stern TV” broadcast the images, reported extensively on the alleged scandal and thus triggered a wave of outrage. Sensational media reports followed, and people took to the streets against the practices at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen.
Protests, lawsuits, death threats
When the wave swept over Logothetis and his colleagues, they initially reacted in disbelief: for them, the video was obviously maliciously edited and showed a distorted picture of their research on animals. The ethics committee finally approved the idea of inserting microelectrodes into the monkeys’ heads to measure their brain activity. But then the wave turned into a tsunami. Criminal charges and death threats rained down on the brain researcher, who had been treated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. According to hate reports, he was supposed to »leave the building only with a crash helmet«, was compared to the concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele, and once, at the hairdresser’s, they refused to serve him. To the public, Logothetis was an animal abuser. Colleagues and employees asserted that the brain researcher had always adhered to the highest standards and that no animal was harmed unnecessarily in his laboratory. This was later confirmed by an official report.