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Baruch Blumberg - Inductive and deductive research (19/80)

96 views · Published 30 June 2017 · 2:28 · Indexed 12 November 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

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To hear more of Baruch Blumberg’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QedXwz9QEXY&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFyPwAEJ9YaYAsj3ANqc9teW

The late Baruch Blumberg (1925-2011) was an American scientist and doctor whose most significant contributions to medicine include the identification of the Hepatitis B virus. He was one of three co-recipients of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. [Listener: Rebecca Blanchard; date recorded: 2007]

TRANSCRIPT: That was the beginning of this kind of search, we were... we were... it was sort of stamp collecting, you know, we were looking for accumulation of data and it’s... that is part of... of the inductive form of research. If you think of research as being inductive and deductive and kind of simply put, is that in inductive research you collect the data first, then you make the hypothesis. In deductive, you have to start off with the hypothesis, and then you collect data to test it, you know, formally to try to reject it. And then if you don't reject it after multiple tries, then you say, okay this may or may not be, it... it may or not be true, but what I can tell you is that it wasn't rejected on... on the basis of several studies. That's a kind of Popperian view, you know, formal Popperian view of... of how you do science. Well, the thing about... about inductive research is that’s where you get new ideas. You know, if you have a hypothesis, you already have that idea. If you're collecting data and making new ones, that's new ideas. It's very difficult to fund inductive research and the... they... everyone wants hypothesis-driven research. In other words, you start of with something you think you know and then you test it. All, you know, these things fit in. Sometimes they're actually going on at the same time, very often in research, a particular experiment can be both deductive and inductive, because you produce a lot of data from which you can make new hypotheses. But it’s always been a big issue, you know, getting funding for inductive research and I... and I recently set up a... a fund in effect to do inductive research. It’s... perhaps talk about that a bit later, this fund is going extremely well, we've got... collected quite a lot of money for it. But in any case, so the plan was that I was going to carry on doing this, you know, just collecting data, with the expectation that something interesting is going to happen, a certainty that something interesting is going to happen, faith that something is going to happen.

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