Why science doesn't sell · Issue 872

Neil Young reviews the relationship between journalism and science and critically assesses the reliability of the facts which appear within the media

Archie Cochrane. Does that name mean anything to you? It should. His work, which largely took place in Cardiff where he was a Professor at the University of Wales School of Medicine, has probably saved more lives than that of any other doctor.

Not only was he a brilliant scientist, he was also a genuine war hero. After dropping out of medical school to join the International Brigade and fight in the Spanish Civil War, he served with the Medical Corps during WWII, was captured in Greece and spent four years in German POW camps as a medical officer, treating fellow prisoners of all nationalities. The suffering he and other prisoners endured guided his work and desire to ensure the highest standards of evidence were applied to medical science.

His work on evidence-based medicine, and the subsequent idea that the results of individual, well designed, randomised trials, could be combined together to produce more accurate results are his legacy. There’s an army of scientists, the Cochrane Collaboration, who work towards this goal.

So when you read claims that “using a mobile phone is worse for your health than smoking” then perhaps we should study the evidence for this claim.

Maybe this story worried you. It seems plausible: an ‘award winning’ scientist, Dr Vini Khurana, says it’s true. The notion that microwaves could cause brain cancer isn’t that far fetched – microwaves cook food, why can’t they cook your brain – so why shouldn’t we take the story at face value?

The first question one might like to ask is where this piece of science is published. Has it been published in a mainstream journal? Has it been peer reviewed? How can we assess the quality of the argument?

Dr Khurana’s work turns out to be self-published on his own website and has not (yet) been peer reviewed. Does that mean it’s wrong? No – of course not. But it’s hard to justify whipping up a storm of fear and panic based on work that doesn’t meet the generally accepted standards of science.

What is the evidence regarding mobile phones and brain cancer? Well there are dozens of papers which suggest no link, and a couple that do. But statistics and the ideas developed by the Cochrane Collaboration can help us analyse this mountain of data and draw some evidence-based conclusions.

Guess what – this has been done and was published in the Journal of Neuro-oncology: “We found no overall increased risk of brain tumours among cellular phone users. The potential elevated risk of brain tumours after long-term cellular phone use awaits confirmation by future studies.”

You won’t have read this in the national press, let alone gair rhydd. Of course not – it’s not attention grabbing and it wasn’t hyped up and press released into the mainstream.

The basic business model of newspapers is to sell advertising space, the more readers, the greater the profit per inch of advertising space. Scare stories about cancer shift units. Statistics don’t.

These non-stories always make an ‘appeal to authority’ – mentioning that a particular scientist is ‘award winning’ or ‘renowned. ‘ As if having a big shiny plaque on your wall, or string of letters after your name makes your unpublished findings more valid.

The quack nutrition industry takes Linus Pauling and his two Nobel Prizes into battle like the ancient Israelites carried the Ark of the Covenant – a guarantee of victory against all foes.

A giant in the field of physical chemistry, Pauling won his first Nobel Prize for work on theories of chemical bonding. He went on to win a second Nobel Prize for campaigning against nuclear weapons. A genius by any description, he won more medals, prizes, degrees, gongs and praise than almost any thinker of his generation.

The quack nutritionists, that vitamin-gobbling, fish-oil-swallowing, colon cleansing lot who are constantly on the GMTV sofa and the pages of neon coloured women’s magazines are enamoured of Prof. Pauling. Almost every pill-pushing media diet guru mentions his name somewhere in their advertising spiel.

It would be nice to think they appreciate the powerful elegance of orbital hybridisation models in chemistry. Sadly, it’s because in later life Pauling became obsessed with the idea that massive doses of vitamin C could treat just about every human ailment up to and including cancer.

Sadly more than one well designed, peer reviewed, published set of experiments, have shown this not to be the case, however attractive the idea might be, the evidence just isn’t there.

Pauling’s reputation is used by the nutrition industry to justify all sorts of claims. There is precious little evidence that vitamin supplements are of any benefit to people eating a normal healthy diet – the type your mother told you about – yet it’s a multi billion-dollar industry.

There’s a body of evidence that suggest vitamin supplements can actually decrease life expectancy and are of no discernable benefit. This evidence was gathered by, you guessed it, the Cochrane Collaboration. Yet, you no doubt read that we should ‘pay that little extra for vitamin supplements.’

I could go on and on – and probably on some more – about celebrity/media/nutrition industry endorsed ideas on organic food, fish oil supplements, the ideal hangover cure. The very notion that pills can solve complex problems like how to improve exam performance, etc, etc. All seem unlikely.

Yet the media are bloated with this nonsense. Maybe the people writing it know they’re wrong, but just don’t care – the ‘never let the facts get in the way of a good story’ school of journalism. Maybe they don’t have the skills to assess whether something is likely to be true or not. Either way, it’s an insult to people like Archie Cochrane, who devoted his life to cutting through bullshit.