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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?”

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