KINSOLVING: Larry, does the president have any reaction to the announcement [by] the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic [in] over 600 cases?
SPEAKES: What’s AIDS?
KINSOLVING: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.” (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that gets this has died. And I wondered if the president is aware of it?
SPEAKES: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter.)
KINSOLVING: No, I don’t.
SPEAKES: You didn’t answer my question.
KINSOLVING: Well, I just wondered, does the president—
SPEAKES: How do you know? (Laughter.)
KINSOLVING: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?
SPEAKES: No, I don’t know anything about it, Lester.
KINSOLVING: Does the president, does anybody in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?
SPEAKES: I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s been any—
KINSOLVING: Nobody knows?
SPEAKES: There has been no personal experience here.
In retrospect and with full knowledge about the suffering to come, the words and laughter from that White House “briefing” ring especially cruel. The exchange revealed ignorance, fear, and the disconnect between politics and science. A deadly disease appeared to be striking young gay men. Did the president have a reaction? No, the press secretary replied, implying: None of us around here are gay enough to have had that experience. Speakes made no comment about the health dimension or the research that was needed to solve the crisis. He made no reference to public health or education. He addressed the questions through his peculiar political filter.
It’s impossible to look back on this exchange and not find it appalling. But a variation of it happens with alarming frequency. We often respond emotionally or dismissively to problems we don’t understand. Science, on the other hand, teaches us to step back, slow down, and ask, simply and dispassionately.
What’s going on here?
Why is it happening?
What is causing or influencing it?
Test but Verify
The methodical, logical approach to scientific investigation provides a blueprint for inquiry that rewards reality, not emotion, one step at a time.
Start with the facts. What have you observed or what do you know with a high degree of certainty? Fauci knew from the CDC reports that young gay men were dying of a form of pneumonia that only strikes people whose immune systems have been compromised.
Formulate your question. What’s going on and why? Why were these young men dying of a disease that wasn’t supposed to attack healthy people? Fauci’s team wanted to know.
Develop a hypothesis—your explanation for what you’ve observed—and test it. In many ways, this hypothesis is the crux of scientific inquiry. The ancient Greek origins of the word offer an explanation. Hypo means “foundation,” and thesis means “placing.” Many people confuse hypotheses with theories, thinking they’re one and the same. But a hypothesis comes before a theory or explanation. It’s the soil below the basement of scientific thought. Charles Darwin had a hypothesis, that plant and animal species originated through competition and “natural selection.” Only half a century later, after vast amounts of research and observation, did scientists elevate that hypothesis into a theory: the foundation of an entire field of science. Fauci’s hypothesis was that an autoimmune disease was killing these young men, and it was a new disease the world had not previously seen.
Through experimentation, testing, measurement, and documentation Fauci worked to see if his hypothesis held up. Only by submitting ideas to rigorous experimentation, measurement, and scrutiny could he know if the hypothetical ground was stable enough to support the foundation of theory. This meant sharing findings with peers who in turn set out to disprove the hypothesis. Think how different this line of inquiry is from politics and business and so much else in life. So many questions tend to be rhetorical, seeking answers that prove people right—or, at least, on the “right” side. In science, you are trying to prove yourself wrong. The triumph comes when you cannot. It means you have a reasonably stable hypothesis.
If your hypothesis survives this scientific trial by fire, you have an explanation. But even then you haven’t achieved total certainty. In science, no answer is ever complete because after your “Why?” is answered, it breeds an infinite number of “Whys.” There is more research to be done, new discoveries to make.
These principles—facts, hypothesis, test—can be your guideposts to bring science into your questioning. They will apply in different ways as you connect your observations and facts to your experiments, trying to determine whether your answers hold up to scrutiny. Be prepared to think differently because you have to go into the process embracing uncertainty, reaching into the unknown, knowing answers will take time.
Stretch Yourself
Let’s say you had a bad car accident. You came out of it with three broken ribs, whiplash, bad bruises, and persistent pain. You know you’re lucky to be alive and still able to move at all, but you hurt like hell. You go to physical therapy and that seems to help, but the pain doesn’t go away. Your doctor prescribes pain meds, but you hate them. They send you into orbit, and they don’t relieve all the pain anyway. Some friends tell you to try yoga. You read up on it and decide to give it a go. You’re desperate, so it’s worth the effort. It’s not exactly fun and it wipes you out, but after a couple of months, you think you’re feeling a little less pain.
Is it the yoga that’s making the difference or is your body just healing over time?
You think yoga is working. Maybe yoga can move your body and joints and muscles in ways that minimize the pain from your injury. That’s your hypothesis.
You decide to try a little experiment and see if your hypothesis holds up. You stop the yoga. Within a few days, you’re pretty sure the pain is getting worse. Sometimes it’s hard to tell because it’s been such a constant part of your life since the accident. Every day you chart your pain—rating it on a scale of one to ten—when you wake up, at lunchtime, before dinner, and when you go to bed. After a few weeks, you see a trend: Your pain is worse in the morning, after you get up. It goes down around lunch, picks up again around dinner, and ticks up a little more before bedtime. It follows this pattern over several weeks.
You wonder if the morning pain is due to stiffness from sleeping or because you’re going to bed with more pain and sleeping poorly. You wonder whether the increase in pain in the evening is because you’re just tired and feeling it more, or whether you’re feeling the effects of a day’s worth of activity. You decide to start the yoga again, this time doing it twice a day—in the morning when you wake up and again just before bed.
After another couple of weeks, you see a change. Your pain still peaks in the morning, but it’s down from where it was when you weren’t doing the yoga. It still ticks up around dinner, but now it goes back down before bedtime. You conclude yoga twice a day is helping. You can’t be 100 percent sure that it’s just the yoga. But your chart and your experience indicate a connection between more yoga and less pain.