Venki Ramakrishnan warns of trust erosion in science due to deep‑learning ‘black box’

Venki Ramakrishnan is a Nobel Prize-winning biologist whose many scientific contributions include his work on the atomic structure of the ribosome—in effect, a huge molecular machine that reads our genes and makes proteins. His work would have been impossible without powerful computers. The Internet made his own work a lot easier and, he notes, acted as a leveler internationally: “When I grew up in India, if you wanted to get a book, it would show up six months or a year after it had already come out in the West. ... Journals would arrive by surface mail a few months later. I didn’t have to deal with it, because I left India when I was nineteen, but I know Indian scientists had to deal with it. Today they have access to information at the click of a button. More important, they have access to lectures. They can listen to Richard Feynman. That would have been a dream of mine when I was growing up. They can just watch Richard Feynman on the Web. That’s a big leveling in the field.” And yet... “Along with the benefits [of the Web], there is now a huge amount of noise. You have all of these people spouting pseudoscientific jargon and pushing their own ideas as if they were science.” As president of the Royal Society, Venki worries, too, about the broader issue of trust: public trust in evidence-based scientific findings, but also trust among scientists, bolstered by rigorous checking of one another ’s conclusions—trust that is in danger of eroding because of the “black box” character of deep-learning computers. “This [erosion] is going to happen more and more, as data sets get bigger, as we have genome- wide studies, population studies, and all sorts of things,” he says. “How do we, as a science community, grapple with this and communicate to the public a sense of what science is about, what is reliable in science, what is uncertain in science, and what is just plain wrong in science?” 127 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016930