Who Qualifies as an “Expert” And How Can We Decide Who Is Trustworthy?
This article is part of the magazine, "The Future of Science In America: The Election Issue," co-published by LeapsMag, the Aspen Institute Science & Society Program, and GOOD.
Expertise is a slippery concept. Who has it, who claims it, and who attributes or yields it to whom is a culturally specific, sociological process. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed a remarkable emergence of legitimate and not-so-legitimate scientists publicly claiming or being attributed to have academic expertise in precisely my field: infectious disease epidemiology. From any vantage point, it is clear that charlatans abound out there, garnering TV coverage and hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers based on loud opinions despite flimsy credentials. What is more interesting as an insider is the gradient of expertise beyond these obvious fakers.
A person's expertise is not a fixed attribute; it is a hierarchical trait defined relative to others. Despite my protestations, I am the go-to expert on every aspect of the pandemic to my family. To a reporter, I might do my best to answer a question about the immune response to SARS-CoV-2, noting that I'm not an immunologist. Among other academic scientists, my expertise is more well-defined as a subfield of epidemiology, and within that as a particular area within infectious disease epidemiology. There's a fractal quality to it; as you zoom in on a particular subject, a differentiation of expertise emerges among scientists who, from farther out, appear to be interchangeable.
We all have our scientific domain and are less knowledgeable outside it, of course, and we are often asked to comment on a broad range of topics. But many scientists without a track record in the field have become favorites among university administrators, senior faculty in unrelated fields, policymakers, and science journalists, using institutional prestige or social connections to promote themselves. This phenomenon leads to a distorted representation of science—and of academic scientists—in the public realm.
Trustworthy experts will direct you to others in their field who know more about particular topics, and will tend to be honest about what is and what isn't "in their lane."
Predictably, white male voices have been disproportionately amplified, and men are certainly over-represented in the category of those who use their connections to inappropriately claim expertise. Generally speaking, we are missing women, racial minorities, and global perspectives. This is not only important because it misrepresents who scientists are and reinforces outdated stereotypes that place white men in the Global North at the top of a credibility hierarchy. It also matters because it can promote bad science, and it passes over scientists who can lend nuance to the scientific discourse and give global perspectives on this quintessentially global crisis.
Also at work, in my opinion, are two biases within academia: the conflation of institutional prestige with individual expertise, and the bizarre hierarchy among scientists that attributes greater credibility to those in quantitative fields like physics. Regardless of mathematical expertise or institutional affiliation, lack of experience working with epidemiological data can lead to over-confidence in the deceptively simple mathematical models that we use to understand epidemics, as well as the inappropriate use of uncertain data to inform them. Prominent and vocal scientists from different quantitative fields have misapplied the methods of infectious disease epidemiology during the COVID-19 pandemic so far, creating enormous confusion among policymakers and the public. Early forecasts that predicted the epidemic would be over by now, for example, led to a sense that epidemiological models were all unreliable.
Meanwhile, legitimate scientific uncertainties and differences of opinion, as well as fundamentally different epidemic dynamics arising in diverse global contexts and in different demographic groups, appear in the press as an indistinguishable part of this general chaos. This leads many people to question whether the field has anything worthwhile to contribute, and muddies the facts about COVID-19 policies for reducing transmission that most experts agree on, like wearing masks and avoiding large indoor gatherings.
So how do we distinguish an expert from a charlatan? I believe a willingness to say "I don't know" and to openly describe uncertainties, nuances, and limitations of science are all good signs. Thoughtful engagement with questions and new ideas is also an indication of expertise, as opposed to arrogant bluster or a bullish insistence on a particular policy strategy regardless of context (which is almost always an attempt to hide a lack of depth of understanding). Trustworthy experts will direct you to others in their field who know more about particular topics, and will tend to be honest about what is and what isn't "in their lane." For example, some expertise is quite specific to a given subfield: epidemiologists who study non-infectious conditions or nutrition, for example, use different methods from those of infectious disease experts, because they generally don't need to account for the exponential growth that is inherent to a contagion process.
Academic scientists have a specific, technical contribution to make in containing the COVID-19 pandemic and in communicating research findings as they emerge. But the liminal space between scientists and the public is subject to the same undercurrents of sexism, racism, and opportunism that society and the academy have always suffered from. Although none of the proxies for expertise described above are fool-proof, they are at least indicative of integrity and humility—two traits the world is in dire need of at this moment in history.
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Its strength is in its lack of size.
Using materials on the minuscule scale of nanometers (billionths of a meter), nanomedicines have the ability to provide treatment more precise than any other form of medicine. Under optimal circumstances, they can target specific cells and perform feats like altering the expression of proteins in tumors so that the tumors shrink.
Another appealing concept about nanomedicine is that treatment on a nano-scale, which is smaller yet than individual cells, can greatly decrease exposure to parts of the body outside the target area, thereby mitigating side effects.
But this young field's huge potential has met with an ongoing obstacle: the recipient's immune system tends to regard incoming nanomedicines as a threat and launches a complement protein attack. These complement proteins, which act together through a wave of reactions to get rid of troubling microorganisms, have had more than 500 million years to refine their craft, so they are highly effective.
Seeking to overcome a half-billion-year disadvantage, nanomaterials engineers have tried such strategies as creating so-called stealth nanoparticles.
“All new technologies face technical barriers, and it is the job of innovators to engineer solutions to them,” Brenner says.
Despite these clever attempts, nanomedicines largely keep failing to arrive at their intended destinations. According to the most comprehensive meta-analysis of nanomedicines in oncology, fewer than 1 percent of nanoparticles manage to reach their targets. The remaining 99-plus percent are expelled to the liver, spleen, or lungs – thereby squandering their therapeutic potential. Though these numbers seem discouraging, systems biologist Jacob Brenner remains undaunted. “All new technologies face technical barriers, and it is the job of innovators to engineer solutions to them,” he says.
Brenner and his fellow researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have recently devised a method that, in a study published in late 2021 involving sepsis-afflicted mice, saw a longer half-life of nanoparticles in the bloodstream. This effect is crucial because “the longer our nanoparticles circulate, the more time they have to reach their target organs,” says Brenner, the study's co-principal investigator. He works as a critical care physician at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where he also serves as an assistant professor of medicine.
The method used by Brenner's lab involves coating nanoparticles with natural suppressors that safeguard against a complement attack from the recipient's immune system. For this idea, he credits bacteria. “They are so much smarter than us,” he says.
Brenner points out that many species of bacteria have learned to coat themselves in a natural complement suppressor known as Factor H in order to protect against a complement attack.
Humans also have Factor H, along with an additional suppressor called Factor I, both of which flow through our blood. These natural suppressors “are recruited to the surface of our own cells to prevent complement [proteins] from attacking our own cells,” says Brenner.
Coating nanoparticles with a natural suppressor is a “very creative approach that can help tone and improve the activity of nanotechnology medicines inside the body,” says Avi Schroeder, an associate professor at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, where he also serves as Head of the Targeted Drug Delivery and Personalized Medicine Group.
Schroeder explains that “being able to tone [down] the immune response to nanoparticles enhances their circulation time and improves their targeting capacity to diseased organs inside the body.” He adds how the approach taken by the Penn Med researchers “shows that tailoring the surface of the nanoparticles can help control the interactions the nanoparticles undergo in the body, allowing wider and more accurate therapeutic activity.”
Brenner says he and his research team are “working on the engineering details” to streamline the process. Such improvements could further subdue the complement protein attacks which for decades have proven the bane of nanomedical engineers.
Though these attacks have limited nanomedicine's effectiveness, the field has managed some noteworthy successes, such as the chemotherapy drugs Abraxane and Doxil, the first FDA-approved nanomedicine.
And amid the COVID-19 pandemic, nanomedicines became almost universally relevant with the vast circulation of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, both of which consist of lipid nanoparticles. “Without the nanoparticle, the mRNA would not enter the cells effectively and would not carry out the therapeutic goal,” Schroeder explains.
These vaccines, though, are “just the start of the potential transformation that nanomedicine will bring to the world,” says Brenner. He relates how nanomedicine is “joining forces with a number of other technological innovations,” such as cell therapies in which nanoparticles aim to reprogram T-cells to attack cancer.
With a similar degree of optimism, Schroeder says, “We will see further growing impact of nanotechnologies in the clinic, mainly by enabling gene therapy for treating and even curing diseases that were incurable in the past.”
Brenner says that in the next 10 to 15 years, “nanomedicine is likely to impact patients” contending with a “huge diversity” of conditions. “I can't wait to see how it plays out.”
Podcast: A Nasal Spray COVID Booster Shot, With Dr. Akiko Iwasaki
The "Making Sense of Science" podcast features interviews with leading medical and scientific experts about the latest developments and the big ethical and societal questions they raise. This monthly podcast is hosted by journalist Kira Peikoff, founding editor of the award-winning science outlet Leaps.org.
Real-world data shows that protection against Covid-19 infection wanes a few months after two or three shots of mRNA vaccines (while protection against severe disease remains high). But what if there was another kind of booster that could shore up the immune response in your nose, the "door" to your body? Like bouncers at a club, a better prepared nasal defense system could stop the virus in its tracks -- mitigating illnesses as well as community spread. Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale, is working on such a booster, with fantastic results recently reported in mice. In this episode, she shares the details of this important work.
Listen to episode
Kira Peikoff was the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org from 2017 to 2021. As a journalist, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Nautilus, Popular Mechanics, The New York Academy of Sciences, and other outlets. She is also the author of four suspense novels that explore controversial issues arising from scientific innovation: Living Proof, No Time to Die, Die Again Tomorrow, and Mother Knows Best. Peikoff holds a B.A. in Journalism from New York University and an M.S. in Bioethics from Columbia University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two young sons. Follow her on Twitter @KiraPeikoff.