Kyle Van Gordon
In the wake of the trial of Elizabeth Holmes, Nature published a 1200-word article ending with the following: “The question is: what can we learn about it so that it doesn’t happen again?”. That shouldn´t be the last word. It should be the first one.
Though the subject has been analysed to death by a barrage of books, podcasts, and television shows, the analyses skew towards the personal rather than the systemic failings at play that allowed Elizabeth Holmes to succeed for as long as she did. Furthermore, these failings and the lessons we collectively refuse to learn have permitted a golden age of fraud; from the financial crash of 2008 to the cryptocurrency scams of present day. As a PhD student, most of these complex issues are out of my hands, so I submit a simple question: how much responsibility should we as researchers bear for the success of fraudsters?
Fraudsters succeed because they take advantage of a lack of public knowledge in a certain sector: computers, finances, medical technology, etc. More often than not, they succeed despite their own lack of sector-specific knowledge because of the compelling form in which they present and tell a story. This is in comparison to the scientific community, where despite an abundance of knowledge, presentations often struggle to gain traction inside academic and industrial centers, and especially in the public square.
If scientists at the researcher level are not one day supposed to inform the public, then who is? I believe we collectively need to present our findings better-- to ourselves, to our collaborators, and beyond. If we can master the art of storytelling and combine it with the substance researchers have and fraudsters lack, we will all benefit in knowledge and the fact that fraudsters will have fewer heads to turn.
The talk will include necessary historical background and the dangers of fraud, external sources containing strategies for more effective presentation, and (hopefully) expand into a Socratic-esque discussion debating which lessons from this saga are most important for us as researchers and what actions we can take.
This seminar is a response to the special difficulty to glean from scientific literature lessons at a researcher´s level: advice that isn´t directed at entrepreneurs, supervisors, or investors. However, this talk is applicable to all levels-- I believe an editorial published in Science, around the same time as the aforementioned Nature article, captured it best: if we do not learn from this, ¨...they'll hand it over again the next time a similarly compelling tale comes along.
12.00pm, Seminar Room