Tuesday with Bill-If Scientific Discoveries Are Dangerous, Should They Be Censored?’

Transcript – Taylor Packard: Hey Bill Nye it’s Taylor Packard. I was wondering what you think about the censorship of scientific discoveries if the discovery could be used in a hurtful way. If there were censorship how should the censorship process be designed and what groups should be involved in determining what the public does and does not get to know? Thanks so much.

Bill Nye: Taylor. Taylor. Taylor. We in the scientific community have this process, we have this censorship process in the sense that we have what’s called peer review. This is where somebody comes up with a scientific claim or belief or test result, experimental result, other people read it, read the paper, study his or her results and see if there’s any validity to them. And then if there is that paper or that information gets published. So there is in a sense scientific censorship in a sense. If someone makes an extraordinary claim that’s silly or can provably wrong there are systems in place to point out that this thing is not true and ignore it, it didn’t work, it’s not relevant.