Science Is My Copilot

As the world around us seems increasingly volatile, protecting and respecting the integrity of research and evidence becomes more important than ever.

Written byBob Grant

| 3 min read

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Sitting down to write this editorial, I thought I would look back at the one I wrote for our first issue of 2020 to get a sense, at the end of an extremely unpredictable and disconcerting year, of how I was feeling going into it. “In those halcyon days of boyhood, one date stuck in my mind as ‘the future’—2020,” I wrote in The Scientist’s January/February 2020 issue. “That year, difficult to imagine but endlessly entertaining to dream about, was when everything would be different. World peace would be a reality. Technology would solve humanity’s and the planet’s ailments. And yes, cars would fly.”

I knew that my childish fantasies had failed to materialize well in advance of last January, but early in the year I had no idea how wrong I would be about 2020. This year has shown us all that, despite humanity’s decades of ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
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From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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