Science: not necessarily transparent.

I enjoy reading George Monbiot, though I don't always agree with him.  In one of his recent articles for The Guardian he made the statement:

"If science is not transparent and accountable, it's not science."

But he's not correct.


Throughout history, much of the natural philosophy we now call 'Science' has been carried out for patronage, for industrial and military advantage, for payment or other personal gain, but only recently has it been done on a large scale for the sake of knowing, for the public good or, perhaps less altruistically, for the good of the state.  The activity of discovering and explaining the universe and its mechanisms has, historically, rarely been separated from venal interests or interfering funders.  


In some ways we have in the last few decades been living through a Golden Age of science in which there is substantial (if not adequate) state funding in most developed nations, and relatively little interference or steering from public funders.  This has coloured some expectations of what science should be: independently-minded, free from financial shackles and interference by funders.  But many patrons of science have expected and enforced secrecy, for fear they would lose their competitive advantage, or their entire business.  Some of these eventually forwent secrecy for protection via patents and other mechanisms (but that's another post).  Transparency and accountability was not always a feature of natural philosophy, and it is not always part of science, now.


Despite all the secrecy, the conflicting interests and the desire to please funders, science has continued to question the universe and receive the best answers available at the time.  It did not matter which military studied ballistics, the results were the same.  No matter who funds the study of a particular chemical synthesis, the results are the same.  Eventually, someone noticed the link between smoking and lung cancer, despite tobacco industry suppression.  Some details aside, the universe gives more or less the same answers regardless of who is asking the question, who pays the questioner, and who, if anyone, is told about the result.  That a result is secret, or paid for, does not make it untrue or undiscoverable.  Nor does it necessarily affect the validity of the science that was done.


An essential feature of science is that someone else could ask the same question and get the same answer; your secret is secret only for as long as no-one else asks the same question.  Your answer, if obtained honestly, should be independent of commission or ideology.  


Transparency and accountability are not essential features of science but they are highly desirable elements in the practice of science, and in policy-making, which is the point I would rather Monbiot had made.