Jay Bhattacharya and the Scientific Promise

In 2020, if you suggested COVID-19 emerged from a lab rather than a bat at a wet market, you would quickly earn the moniker of “conspiracy theorist.” That was just the beginning of pandemic whiplash. One week, health officials assured us masks were unnecessary; the next, double-masking became essential. Officials initially said lockdowns were unlikely to be helpful before recommending extreme stay-at-home measures. Criticizing any top-down policies at the time was blasphemous. But Dr. Jay Bhattacharya did exactly that.

Before March 2020, the Stanford professor was largely unknown outside academic circles. Then came COVID-19, which would transform him from a respected researcher with over 135 peer-reviewed papers to one of the pandemic’s most controversial figures. Now, Bhattacharya is set to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the U.S., the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research and the same institution that helped shape many of the policies he questioned. The moment has pushed many to ask: how do we approach science in uncertain times? And can science divorce itself from politics?