Introduction
In May 2022, I gave a commencement address to our graduating global health students at Duke. I warned them that science was under attack and that we needed their help to rebuild trust. I thought things were bad then. I had no idea.
The Speech
Excerpts from commencement address, Duke University, May 6, 2022
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Science, and scientists, are under attack. That was the warning that Dr. Peter Hotez shared with me and a small group of junior professors when he visited Duke in 2018. Peter is the Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. His group developed CORBEVAX, a patent-free COVID-19 vaccine that just might help to vaccinate the world.
Huddled around that small conference table in 2018, Peter told us that scientists need to recognize their role—our role—in fighting against the troubling rise of vaccine skeptics and science denialism. This was about two years before COVID, so Peter was largely speaking about the return of measles in the US.
I found his talk engaging, but I didn’t recognize the urgency of his message at the time. COVID changed that.
In the speech, I went on to describe what I witnessed during the pandemic: a scientific triumph—vaccines developed in record time—met not with gratitude but with suspicion. Scientists harassed and threatened. Misinformation spreading faster than the virus itself. People dying preventable deaths because trust had broken down somewhere along the way.
That was 2022. I wish I could tell you things have improved.
In the years since that speech, the trends I warned about have accelerated. The polarization of science didn’t end with COVID—it deepened. Vaccine skepticism has spread beyond COVID to childhood immunizations that were once routine. Measles outbreaks have returned to communities across the country. Climate denial has intensified even as wildfires, floods, and heat waves break records. And the agencies that fund and protect public health research—the NIH, the CDC, the FDA—face unprecedented political pressure.
Peter Hotez, the scientist I mentioned in that speech, has become one of the most harassed researchers in America. He’s received death threats for advocating vaccines. Let that sink in: a scientist who helped develop a patent-free vaccine to help the world’s poorest people is now a target of organized harassment. This is where we are.
But here’s what I still believe, perhaps even more strongly than I did in 2022: science matters. It remains our best tool for understanding the world and solving problems. And if science matters, then training the next generation of researchers matters. We need to prepare the world’s best scientists—people who can ask important questions, design rigorous studies, and produce evidence that earns trust.
I started writing this book to fill a perceived pedagogical gap. I finished it to help meet the urgency of the moment.
Why This Book
If you’re going to rebuild trust in science, you need to understand how science actually works—not the idealized version from textbooks, but the messy, uncertain, human process of generating knowledge. You need to know how studies are designed, how evidence is evaluated, and how to spot the difference between rigorous research and motivated reasoning. You need to understand why scientists disagree, why studies fail to replicate, and why uncertainty isn’t a weakness but a feature.
This book won’t make you a statistician. It won’t turn you into an epidemiologist overnight. But it will give you the foundation to think critically about research—to ask the right questions, to evaluate evidence, and to contribute meaningfully to research teams or public discourse.
Whether you become a researcher or a consumer of research, whether you work in clinics or courtrooms, in boardrooms or classrooms, you will encounter claims backed by “science.” This book will help you figure out which ones to believe.
We need well-trained researchers and scientifically literate citizens now more than ever. The stakes are too high to sit this one out.
Let’s get to work.