Dear readers,

Often, when we write story after story, certain themes start to emerge. At STAT right now, one of those themes is trust in science. The degree to which people trust scientific institutions is affecting almost everything we write about.

That’s why at the STAT Summit, being held next week in Boston, trust in science will take center stage.

First, we’ll have a bravura panel from STAT’s new dedicated trust-in-science reporter, Nick Florko, focused on the reasons for vaccine hesitancy. Nick’s stage work is legendary here. His story on one of the panelists, sociologist and author Jennifer Reich, was our site’s most-read article last week.

The panel will also include Cory Anderson, who studies Plain Anabaptists (Amish, Mennonite, and related groups) in public health, demography, culture, and law. As one of the few Plain Anabaptist adherents holding a professorship, he brings lived experience and research training to his work. This will be a very important session.

I will host a panel on how trust in scientific institutions, and in some cases a lack of it, has impacted important technologies including recombinant DNA, mRNA, and artificial intelligence.

We’ll try to understand how innovators can make sure their creations are both ethical and are perceived as ethical. I’ll be joined by Biogen CEO Christopher Viehbacher, the distinguished scientist Victor Dzau, and Cara LaPointe of Georgetown University, who have been discussing this topic as part of a panel convened by the National Academy of Medicine.

I’ll also sit down with the National Academy of Medicine’s president, Monica Bertagnolli, and Grace Graham, deputy commissioner of policy, legislation, and international affairs at the Food and Drug Administration, to talk about how technology can speed clinical research — a topic that longtime readers of STAT will know I focused on in one of my favorite stories, about what it means to say this is biology’s century.

Discussion of these issues will be threaded throughout the two days of the event, including our discussions with three former FDA commissioners, our conversations with Merck and Moderna, our interview with the editor in chief of Science and the MIT president, and the questions we ask Congressman Jake Auchincloss.

I’m confident attendees will draw the kinds of lessons about this issue, one of the key challenges facing anyone in the science business today, that they won’t get anywhere else.

I hope to see you there.