Science is meant to be ruled by reason and evidence. But for centuries, only certain people were trusted to practise it.
In this episode, Mary-Ann Ochota takes us to Cambridge in 1897, where crowds gathered on the streets to protest against women being allowed to earn degrees. Journalist and author Angela Saini explains how the Royal Society, founded in 1660 on the radical idea of testing claims rather than simply trusting the person making them, became a gentlemen's club that kept women and working class scientists locked out for centuries.
It's a question that's shaped science ever since. If evidence is meant to speak for itself, why has reputation always mattered just as much, and what happens when that reputation is faked, as with Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who convinced billionaires to back blood testing technology that never worked?
To help answer that, Mary-Ann talks to astrophysicist Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars as a PhD student in 1967 and had to fight to be believed by her own supervisor. Cognitive neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott also joins to unpack why humans are so easily swayed by authority and status.
It's the next step in a story running from ancient coins to today's digital world, asking one slippery question: who gets to decide what's true?
Trust Forward is a podcast from Sumsub, AI powered trust infrastructure for compliance operations at scale, made in collaboration with This is Distorted. Every story here is really a version of the same problem playing out in a different era. Today it plays out online, in the moment a business has to decide whether to trust a stranger on the other side of a screen. That's the problem Sumsub exists to solve.
Sumsub's Website: sumsub.com
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Sumsub's YouTube Channel: youtube.com/@sumsubcom
Mary-Ann Ochota on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mary-ann-ochota-frgs-9234aa61/
Angela Saini: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelasaini/
Jocelyn Bell Burnell: https://royalsociety.org/people/jocelyn-bell-burnell-11066/
Professor Sophie Scott on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sophie-scott-179b6610/
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Resources for this episode can be found here: https://trustforward.sumsub.com/episodes/trust-me-im-a-scientist/
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