Editorial by Jacques Robert, Emeritus Professor of Cancerology, member of the OPS Board of Directors
Trad. Chat GPT/DeepL
7 February 2025
The Observatoire d'Éthique universitaire recently published a post describing the damaging effects of self-censorship on the quality of research. No, journals should not give ideological instructions on the content of articles submitted to them. No, researchers should not refuse to publish research whose conclusions do not conform to a certain doxa. No, we must not abandon the principles of evidence-based medicine in order to please a self-righteous fringe of the population. Let's not forget how many philosophers and scientists have had to wriggle out of the fear of censorship in order to publish their work and thoughts. Galileo, Spinoza and Descartes are the first names that spring to mind, but there were so many others! Who could have written and published, until the emergence of the Enlightenment, that God did not exist? If the Springer Nature group had existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it would surely have published ‘new ethical guidelines to eliminate potential harm to believers who do not participate in research but who could be harmed by its publication’. Replace ‘believers’ with ‘human groups’ and you have verbatim what Nature Human Behaviour published.
We have also denounced the abuses of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) in American universities, a smokescreen for social inequality, designed mainly to ease the conscience of a certain ‘elite’ and provide jobs for diversity professionals with masters degrees in all kinds of ‘studies’: ‘gender’ studies, ‘race’ studies [1], ‘fat’ studies [2] and others. Marx has been relegated to the storehouse of antiquities, and there is no longer any interest in the living conditions of the most disadvantaged (those who were called ‘proletarians’ at the time) or in the establishment of a ‘social lift’ that does not always break down, but only in their equitable representation in genomic databases. Biomedical research must be objective and not concerned with pleasing people... Are we going to remove obesity from the list of diseases in the same way as we removed gender dysphoria from the DSM5? Obesity is a factor in premature death and requires therapeutic management, while gender dysphoria [3] is ‘cured’ by mutilation and lifelong medication... We must not play games with the health of those who confide in us and please them; the Hippocratic oath forbids us to do so.
And now, in the United States, even greater insanities are being introduced. The new president wants to issue a decree imposing some form of care for minors suffering from pubertal sex anxiety. This is not his role. It is not the role of a politician, whether or not we agree with his or her economic or social views, to issue medical directives on the pretext of common sense. Therapeutic protocols are established on the basis of scientific data, not on the basis of ‘common sense’, which is all too often hypothetical. Common sense’ tells us that the earth is flat, but science tells us that it is not. Common sense’ tells us that there are two sexes; science tells us that this is true. We cannot rely on our ‘senses’ to state scientific facts, but on the analysis of our observations and experiments. In the case of the problems posed by gender dysphoria, it so happens that the American organisation that produces the most influential standards of care in the world, WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health), among other facts that discredit its recommendations, which are supposed to be based on solid evidence, committed a major scientific fraud by asking experts from Johns Hopkins University to provide it with conclusions before they had carried out their expert assessment. The fact that it was the President of the United States who pointed out this fraud, as we had done before him, in no way prevents it from having been committed! And that it removes a large part of the credibility of this organisation.
The fact that a Dutch team involved in the management of this same disease has published an article proposing to evaluate the results of its management using criteria that are foreign to evidence-based medicine does not prevent me from sharing with Trump my complete disagreement. We are not going to deny the principles to which we adhere because Trump supports them. Moreover, the journal BMC Medical Ethics, in which the article by the Dutch team appeared, is a journal that defies editorial rules; take a look at the composition of the Editorial Board of this journal, which is supposed to deal with medical ethics, and you'll be as surprised as I am. I wrote a Letter to the Editor in the usual form (Dear Sir, I read with much interest, etc.) but I wasn't even able to submit it: there's no provision for this, you have to pay €2,000 just like any other article. This journal is still on the list of recommended journals of our CNU deans and section presidents, but perhaps not for long...
Let's make no mistake! Trump did declare (as if he had decided) that there are two sexes, male and female, but he did not declare that the earth was round, another obvious fact, simply because the platists vote for him[4]. If his opponents hadn't sunk into the web of idiocy about the number of sexes, which I denounced in an article[5], perhaps he would have refrained from these rantings! But then, his rival in the presidential election, Kamala Harris, used some strange language, indicating her pronouns before her speeches, saying in an interview that you can never be woke enough, asking, when she was a prosecutor, for ‘gender affirmation’ operations (in French: sex change) to be paid for by prisoners who so wished, whereas all births are billed at least 12,000 dollars to parturients, and so on. She lost six million voters compared to the 2020 election: three went to Trump and three abstained... Trump understood this and if the majority of his voters had believed in the existence of five sexes like Fausto-Sterling, he would have declared that there are five sexes! You mustn't confuse a scientific assertion with electoral pandering...
It would seem, then, that we scientists and doctors are caught between wokism and trumpism! On the side of wokism, we have to fight against the anti-vaxxers, against the harmful beliefs spread as if for pleasure against the evidence of health. Some believe that you can be born ‘in the wrong body’ and that gender is ‘assigned at birth’ by a decision that is, after all, arbitrary [6]; others are convinced of the benefits of so-called ‘alternative’ medicines, naturopathy, etiopathy and other nonsense; others that obesity is the result of the way people look at you and that ‘fat-phobia’ is a nasty sin; others who believe that veganism is the solution to all dietary imbalances, when in fact it is a major one; others who find the classic representation of active, mobile spermatozoa trying to penetrate the passive, immobile egg to be atrociously derogatory to women. The reason of certain doctors and biologists seems to have deserted the world of science.
As for Trumpism, for every statement that makes sense, there are ten that do not. I won't go into the disregard for the fight against climate change, which is not a medical issue, or the incredible presidential pardon granted to rioters while Dr Anthony Fauci's protection was withdrawn, but I can't fail to mention Trump's rantings on the treatment of Covid-19 (bleach, ingestion of a UV lamp, and even hydroxychloroquine!). The recruitment of a Secretary of State for Health opposed to vaccinations will be remembered as one of the most serious attacks on public health ever perpetrated in a developed country. Let's not get carried away by justifying the nonsense of some by the dictates of others; threats to science can come from all sides, and we should have no qualms about denouncing them wherever they come from. It is inevitable that the most powerful will attack others, but that does not make us happy. The enemies of our adversaries are not our allies: we are next on their proscription list [7].
I would like to thank François Rastier, Nathalie Heinich, Vincent Tournier and Caroline Eliacheff for their constructive comments.
[1] Americans still haven't understood that what they call ‘race’ in the human species is simply a different distribution of genetic polymorphisms across ethnic groups, with inter- and intra-ethnic overlaps.
[2] How do you translate ‘fat studies’?
[3] Better known today as pubertal sex anxiety.
[4] I borrow this formulation from François Rastier.
[5] Robert J. La biologie, martyre des philosophes. Innov Ther Oncol 2023; 9: 179-184.
[6] An article in the New England Journal of Medicine stated in 2020 [doi: 10.1056/NEJMp2025974] that ‘Leaving any sex designation visible on birth certificates sacrifices privacy and exposes people to discrimination’.
[7] I also borrow this formulation from François Rastier.
Comments