Episode
Colin Wright Convinced a $1.8 Billion Institution to Fix Science | Ep. 34
- Podcast
- The Jeremy Boreing Show
- Published
- Jun 11, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 6195
- Processing state
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- https://traffic.megaphone.fm/YTYIE5567735606.mp3
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Summary
The peer review system that governs scientific publishing was built to be an immune system — a self-correcting mechanism to keep bad science from becoming policy. It isn't working. In fields captured by ideology, particularly gender medicine, the correction mechanism has been reversed: papers that confirm the approved narrative sail through, while letters to the editor challenging them are ghosted, buried in endless limbo, or sent back to the same reviewers who approved the original paper. Dissent doesn't get published. It disappears. And in the absence of peer-reviewed counter-evidence, judges, policymakers, and medical boards treat the silence as consensus. Colin Wright has been fighting this for eight years. He left academic biology rather than write DEI statements affirming things he knew to be false. He was canceled at peak cancel culture for publishing — in Quillette and the Wall Street Journal — a simple biological claim: there are exactly two sexes. He watched papers that would have been laughed out of any rigorous review process get cited by the American Academy of Pediatrics, referenced in federal court cases, and used to justify irreversible medical procedures on minors. And rather than opt out of the system or fight it from the outside, he built something new inside it. Colin and Theory and Society editor-in-chief Kevin McCaffrey announced a first-of-its-kind post-publication peer review system through Springer Nature — a $1.8 billion academic institution. The system lets anyone submit a formal peer review of any published paper, routes it through an editorial process that evaluates argument quality rather than ideological alignment, and includes a built-in right of reply. If the original authors respond within a month, both pieces publish simultaneously. I…