Science Communication at EBEC2024 in Innsbruck
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Meeting summary

The very successful 22nd European Bioenergetics Conference, with more than 500 participants, took place at the University of Innsbruck in the last week of August 2024. Ole Petersen, Director of the AE Cardiff Knowledge Hub, delivered a keynote address at the event.

As the name suggests, the congress dealt with the biochemistry and biophysics of biological energy transformations. Many of the keynote lectures were delivered by Members of Academia Europaea (MAEs). Highlights were the plenary overview lectures by Nobel laureates Sir John Walker FRS MAE (MRC, Cambridge) and Hartmut Michel ML MAE (Max Planck Institute, Frankfurt).





Unusually, there was also a plenary session devoted to general issues concerning science communication, including keynote lectures by John Ioannidis (Harvard University), Paolo Bernardi MAE (University of Padua), Ole Petersen FRS ML MAE (Cardiff University), David Nicholls FRS (Buck Institute for Aging, California), and Erich Gnaiger (Innsbruck Medical University).

Great concern was expressed about the increasing number of publications, even in serious peer-reviewed journals, that contain major scientific errors that are never corrected. Bernardi gave a historical account of the development of the field of energy transformation in bioenergetics systems with laudable examples of eminent figures admitting previous erroneous conclusions, thereby allowing the field to progress.

In contrast, Nicholls provided many examples of top journals continuing to publish papers containing even fundamental bioenergetic errors. Petersen, the Director of the AE-Cardiff Hub, discussed the enormous difficulties encountered when trying to clean up the scientific record, as many journals are unwilling to admit and correct errors made.

There was general agreement that we need a better research culture, and that academies and scientific societies need to play a much more active role in this process.