Skip to main content
Premium Trial:

Request an Annual Quote

'Problematic'

Science is hardly immune to the rash of sexual harassment and abuse pervading the news. The research community has its own Harvey Weinsteins to contend with. But what do we do with the research these scientists produce, Wired asks.

The movies that have been created through the Weinstein production company, (and for many people, movies made by Woody Allen or Roman Polanski, or many others), may now be viewed through a lens of what those men themselves did in their personal lives to women they came into contact with. It makes the work they created "problematic," Wired says.

But that's art. Does it work the same way for science? Science isn't subjective the same way art is. Wired uses the example of Geoff Marcy, the UC Berkeley astronomer who pioneered techniques for finding planets outside Earth's solar system. It seems he got away with sexually harassing students for decades, Wired says, adding, "Clearly, that kept good science from happening — it's reasonable to conclude that Marcy's alleged abuses prevented his targets from doing their best work, or forced them out of science altogether. He pushed all the science they might have done into some alternate timeline."

But, he also discovered or helped discover thousands of worlds. "Unlike art, science has little mechanism to engage with that. They're, you know, planets," the magazine adds.

Researchers can get banned from conferences or fired from their jobs. But if their findings aren't made up or plagiarized, then they'll still be cited and linked to. Other research will be built on them, even if it's inadvertent, and "problematic," Wired says.