excerpts from "Promises, Promises" By Stuart Blackman http://www.the-scientist.com/

Ill-judged predictions and projections can be embarrassing at best  
and, at worst, damaging to the authority of science and science policy.

Scientific authorities have predicted the end of the world and  
civilization as we know them at the hand of pandemics or environmental  
catastrophe. And yet we are still here, in defiance of Thomas  
Malthus’s eighteenth-century warnings about overpopulation and  
ecologist Paul Ehrlich’s prophesy in his 1968 book The Population Bomb  
that “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will  
starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Of course, scientists have a strong incentive to make bold predictions  
- namely, to obtain funding, influence, and high-profile publications.  
But while few will be disappointed when worst-case forecasts fail to  
materialize, unfulfilled predictions - of which we’re seeing more and  
more - can be a blow for patients, policy makers, and for the  
reputation of science itself.

This is not only a waste of financial and legal resources, she says,  
but it serves to narrow social and scientific possibilities. Indeed,  
she says, a promissory culture of science and technology can detract  
from the essence of scientific investigation: “If we already know what  
scientists must produce, then it’s not science—it’s called engineering.”

LEARN FROM HISTORY
According to Nik Brown, just heeding the lessons of past predictions  
and promises - both the successes and the failures - can help  
scientists avoid what he calls “institutional amnesia,” in which they  
deliver serial disappointments.

Some famous (and infamous) predictions

YEAR	
PREDICTION	
RIGHT OR WRONG?

1869	
Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table left spaces for elements that he  
predicted would be discovered. Three of these (gallium, scandium, and  
germanium) were subsequently discovered within his lifetime.	
RIGHT

1964	
Physicists predict the existence of the Higgs Boson. If CERN’s Large  
Hadron Collider finds no evidence for the existence of this massive  
fundamental particle, working models of the material universe might  
require a fundamental rethink.	
PENDING

1965	
Intel cofounder Gordon E. Moore predicts that the number of  
transistors on a computer chip would double every two years. The  
industry has so far managed to keep up (despite many predictions over  
the years about the law’s imminent demise).	
RIGHT

1968
Entomologist Paul Ehrlich predicts that hundreds of millions of people  
will starve to death in the next two decades.	
WRONG

2002	
At the website longbets.org, astronomer Sir Martin Rees, president of  
the Royal Society, predicts that “By 2020, bioterror or bioerror will  
lead to one million casualties in a single event.” Also at Long Bets,  
entrepreneurial engineer Ray Kurzweil bets $10,000 that by 2029 a  
computer will have passed the Turing Test for machine intelligence.	
PENDING

2003	
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory sponsored GeneSweep, a sweepstakes on  
the number of human genes. While bids averaged around 60,000 genes, it  
was eventually won by a bid of 25,947—the lowest of the hundreds  
received.	
WRONG

2007	
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 4th Assessment Report  
projects that global surface air temperatures will increase by between  
1.1 and 6.4°C over preindustrial levels by the end of the century.	
PENDING

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