ABSTRACT

Science is a dynamic, collaborative and creative human endeavour arising from our desire to make sense of our world through exploring the unknown, investigating universal mysteries, making predictions and solving problems. In 1988, the science journal, Nature, published a paper of which the lead author was Jacques Benveniste, head of a biomedical laboratory run by the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. The demand by the editor of Nature that Benveniste and his colleagues replicate their experiments with witnesses and generate similar data to the study they submitted is an extreme example of some of the structures that the science community has in place to organise what counts as science. Science aims to understand a large number of observations in terms of a much smaller number of broad principles. Science knowledge is contestable and is revised, refined and extended as new evidence arises.