24 Opinion
COVID-19 Confusion
The Public Mis-understanding of Science By Muthukumar Elangovan
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
December 2021
COMMUNITY
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. — Isaac Asimov
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OVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus culprit behind the current pandemic, has so far killed around five million people and affected hundreds of millions more all over the world. The pace at which science made vaccines possible for the virus is unprecedented. Given the fact that vaccines generally take years to get approved, the first vaccine for COVID-19 took less than a year. Although this is the first time that an mRNA vaccine has been approved for human use, the mRNA vaccine technology itself was being tested for many years to prevent other viruses. Amidst the current pandemic and huge global vaccination drive, discrediting science and scientists thrives, and social media very often facilitates the spreading of false or misleading information. The public understanding of science and how it works is important in general and is particularly relevant in the context of the current pandemic. However, decades of discrediting science on a range of major issues from climate change and child vaccines to GM foods have created negative effects in the minds of the public. A major part of the mistrust of science is that the public is never involved with scientific methods and applications in solving or understanding scientific problems. For example, part of our team headed by Prof. Jun Young-soo (director of the Cell Logistics Research Center at GIST) studies how SARS-CoV-2 makes numerous tiny packets to produce copies of itself in those packets using host cellular machinery. In the lab, we make a hypothesis, and we test our hypothesis using scientific methods. Many times, our observations turn out to be contradictory to our initial hypothesis. Following this, we accept that our initial hypothesis was wrong (scientists are usually humble when they are wrong!) and test a new hypothesis based on our previous observations. If our observations
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are supportive of our hypothesis, we use different scientific methods to verify our observations before we publish our data. Hence, testing hypotheses, failures, errors, and changing methodologies are a part of the scientific process.
“Amidst the current pandemic and huge global vaccination drive, discrediting science and scientists thrives, and social media very often facilitates the spreading of false or misleading information.” Now consider this: For nearly 1,500 years, Ptolemy’s view that Earth was at the center of the universe was widely believed until Nicolaus Copernicus in 1515 proposed the model that Earth, like Venus or Saturn, circled the Sun. Though the Copernican model was closer to reality, it was still far from perfect, as he incorrectly assumed the orbits of planets were circular. In 1605, Johannes Kepler, using Tycho’s data, announced that planets moved in ellipses with the Sun at one focal point. Galileo Galilei in 1610 made critical observations that demonstrated that Copernican’s “sun-centric” model was basically correct but not the part about circular orbits of the planets. The point is that science is a never-ending process of gathering data, testing the theory, and comparing it with existing theories either to confirm or correct it. Now imagine if centuries of science about planetary motion from Ptolemy’s era to the 17th century were squeezed into one or two years – then the public would be more likely to see the errors of science rather than how it is corrected, which is exactly what is happening now with science
2021-11-26 �� 2:47:25
