The Rise of Bad Science in the Twenty-First Century | David Robert Grimes
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### Skeptical Inquirer Presents
# The Rise of Bad Science in the Twenty-First Century | David Robert Grimes
### Featuring: David Robert Grimes
##### March 19, 2026 - 7:00 pm EDT
Science has been integral to human prosperity, and medical science in particular has been transformative to our well-being. But there are worrying signs that a confluence of factors could undermine that progress: in biomedicine, 87 percent of research is considered waste, either too poorly described or too poorly conducted to be useful (and potentially misleading enough to cause harm). We’ve seen an alarming rise in the number of fabricated papers in the aftermath of COVID-19, causing chaos everywhere from Alzheimer’s research to cancer treatment. And a new administration, openly hostile toward science, has medicine held hostage.
Join us on Thursday, March 19, at 7:00 p.m. ET for a Skeptical Inquirer Presents livestream with David Robert Grimes. The ascendant “Make America Healthy Again” movement has elevated pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and fringe beliefs into actual policy and boosted dubious science to promote an ideological project. But how did we get here, and what can we do about it? In this talk, David Robert Grimes, an expert in the public understanding of medical science, will join us to illuminate the problem—and tell us how we can solve it.
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David Robert Grimes is a scientist, broadcaster, and author of Good Thinking: How Flawed Logic Puts Us All At Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World. Grimes has contributed to many outlets, including The Guardian, Scientific American, The New York Times, the BBC, and more. His research focuses on public understanding of science, medical disinformation, research integrity, and mathematical modeling. Grimes was a joint recipient of the 2014 Nature/Sense about Science John Maddox Prize for standing up for science and is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.