Lessons from the pandemic: Embrace ‘open science,’ confront exclusion of investigators
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The COVID-19 pandemic brought extensive changes to the biomedical science community and revealed research lessons clinicians and scientists should heed going forward, according to a speaker.
The scientific community was confronted with “twin challenges” starting in March 2020: protecting scientific productivity and the careers of young scientists while also quickly localizing threats from a global pandemic with effective public health measures, therapies and vaccines, Shirley M. Tilghman, PhD, emeritus professor of molecular biology and public affairs and past president of Princeton University, said during the Gerald D. Aubach Lecture at the American Society of Bone and Mineral Research annual meeting. The pandemic also brought greater attention to the longstanding underrepresentation of Black, Hispanic and Indigenous people in science and the role of racism in their exclusion, she said.
“Lockdown was followed almost immediately with the killing of George Floyd, reigniting the Black Lives Matter movement, and catalyzing a great national awakening to the reality of systemic racism that has left no one untouched, including we scientists and physicians,” said Tilghman, also a founding member of the National Advisory Council of the Human Genome Project for the NIH. “The crises are not unrelated ... the pandemic held up a mirror to the American people, bringing into stark relief shocking disparities in rates of infection and mortality related to COVID-19 experienced by Black, Hispanic and indigenous people.”
Tilghman highlighted several lessons researchers should take from the crises and how those lessons could strengthen the scientific enterprise.
More ‘open science’
The urgency of the COVID-19 moment, especially within the ranks of immunologists, virologists and structural biologists, expanded use of preprints, or full draft research papers shared publicly before a formal peer review, to alert colleagues of the progress on the disease and its sequalae, Tilghman said. Preprints, used widely for years in physics but only recently in the life sciences, multiplied thanks to a variety of funding agencies, such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and the NIH.
“The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically accelerated the rate of preprints to the point that by April 2021, 30% of all COVID-19 applications were being uploaded onto bioarchives first,” Tilghman said.
Preprints have disadvantages. In the absence of peer-review, research can be poorly conducted, misleading or sometimes wrong, Tilghman said. Still, that should not stop the expansion of more accessible “open science.”
“Will this trend to freely disseminate research papers prior to peer review and their acceptance by journals be sustained after the pandemic, when the sense of urgency recedes?” Tilghman said. “I certainly hope so. This would be a lasting, beneficial consequence of the pandemic. By reducing the power of the journals to hold research hostage through long and often unnecessarily contentious peer review, preprints not only speed up the process but also democratize science for some in other parts the world who do not have access to expensive journal subscriptions.”
Access for everyone
What would have been a small, local seminar at an institution available to the area scientific community before the pandemic can now become a globally attended event for anyone with an Internet connection, thanks to the acceptance of video conference platforms like Zoom.
“It has in some respects accelerated the development of new knowledge, and frankly I don’t think the gears the pandemic set in motion will be able to reverse themselves when this is over,” Tilghman said.
Along with the assembly of new kinds of teams, scientists delayed their research projects to focus together on COVID-19, Tilghman said.
“It was inspiring the watch the community react so quickly to a global emergency and to forgo their own work in favor of the collective good,” Tilghman said. “This response has had a particularly strong impact on students and fellows.”
Lost time for trainees
The pandemic has been especially hard on career prospects of the youngest practitioners — graduate students, post-doctoral students and early-career investigators — many of whom found themselves without the possibility of continuing experiments and losing resources and momentum as a consequence, Tilghman said. Still others found themselves in research limbo, as universities and laboratories shut down.
“It is critical government and private funding agencies recognize the time that these young investigators have lost and compensate for those losses with flexible extensions of support,” Tilghman said. “If ever we needed funding to be nimble and adjust to changing circumstances, it is now.”
Making a case
During and after the pandemic, scientists and researchers must engage more effectively with the people who support their work and find new ways to partner with those who will benefit from their research, Tilghman said.
“The Sabin-Aspen Vaccine Policy and Science Group, which I co-chair, issued a report on vaccine hesitancy that found the most effective way to persuade a hesitant mother to vaccinate her children is a one-on-one conversation with a sympathetic nurse or pediatrician who was willing to listen to her concerns first,” Tilghman said.
Social and behavioral scientists must also develop a greater understanding of how cultural experience and group identity shape trust in scientific research, and how best to address skepticism of well-established scientific findings.
“There is a lot to do to get through this plague with a scientific enterprise that is stronger, more inclusive, more open to sharing our science with each other and the public, who make science possible, and more attentive to the future success of the youngest practitioners,” Tilghman said. “I am hopeful we will get there.”
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Tilghman SM. Gerald D. Aubach Lecture: Science: The endless frontier in the wake of a global pandemic. Presented at: ASBMR Annual Meeting; Oct. 1-4, 2021 (hybrid meeting).
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