Naomi Oreskes: Power, Public Trust, and Science
Historian of science Naomi Oreskes examines how power shapes scientific authority and why public trust in science is both fragile and essential — a free midday lecture at NYU.
Why we picked this
Oreskes has spent two decades documenting how industry-funded doubt campaigns undermine scientific consensus — this lecture brings that work into the present moment, when the stakes of public trust in science have rarely been higher.
Naomi Oreskes has become one of the most important public intellectuals working on the relationship between science, power, and democratic life. A Harvard historian of science and geologist by training, she co-authored Merchants of Doubt, the landmark investigation into how tobacco companies, fossil fuel interests, and other industries manufactured scientific uncertainty to delay regulation. Her work laid the intellectual foundation for understanding how well-funded doubt — not honest skepticism — erodes public trust in expertise.
This free midday lecture at NYU takes on a question that has only grown more urgent: what does it mean for institutions and scientists to hold power, and how does that power either earn or squander public confidence? Oreskes draws on her research into climate denial, pharmaceutical industry data, and the broader history of how scientific consensus forms and gets contested to argue that trust is not simply owed to science — it must be built, maintained, and defended.
The timing is pointed. In an era when federal science agencies face budget cuts and reputational attacks, when peer review and public health guidance are openly questioned from the highest levels of government, Oreskes offers not a defense of scientific authority as such but a clear-eyed account of what makes that authority legitimate — and what destroys it. For anyone trying to think clearly about expertise, institutions, and democratic knowledge, this is a rare chance to hear from the scholar who has done the most rigorous work on these questions.