Another one from across the pond ...

OK, so two posts in a day from the same paper after nearly a month of radio silence. My apologies. With that said, on to the goods ...

From a Guardian column called "Bad Science" (which I encourage all to peek at), an article called "Examine the data, not the author." This, in a way, piggybacks off of an earlier post about applying the same ethics of the media to evaluating scientific literature. Taking it one step further, Goldacre examines the troubling reality of ad hominem attacks tainting reviews of scientific writings that should be based on the data, not necessarily the author.

The article was published in late-June of this year, days before a smoking ban was put into effect somewhere across the pond. A preliminary study published by Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill in 1950 looked at the risk factors of smoking and lung disease, findings that were confirmed four years later by the British Doctors Study.

So, what's the big deal? Here's the kicker ... Goldacre writes:

"You wouldn't know it, but the Nazis beat [Doll and Hill] to it. The Germans had identified a rise in lung cancer as early as the 1920s, but they had suggested - quite reasonably - that it might be related to exposure to poison gas in the great war. In the UK, Doll and Bradford Hill were wondering if it might be related to tarmac, or petrol. Then, during the 1930s, identifying toxic threats in the environment became an important feature of the Nazi project to build a master race through "racial hygiene".

In 1943 two researchers, Schairer and Schöniger, published their own case-control study in the journal Zeitschuft für Krebsforschung, demonstrating a relationship between smoking and lung cancer almost a decade before any researchers elsewhere. It wasn't mentioned in the classic Doll and Bradford Hill paper of 1950, and if you check in the Science Citation Index, the paper was referred to only four times in the 1960s, once in the 1970s, and then not again until 1988. In fact, it was forgotten."

Now, I'm not saying that not citing the 1943 findings is altogether wrong, and neither is Goldacre, necessarily. It was a grim time - to put it mildly, despite the large swath of doctors conducting research such as Schairer and Schöniger. Just an interesting data point in examining scientific literature, whether for purposes of the media or otherwise.

The ethics of journalism and science

Found this article in The Guardian thanks to a post on Maxine Clarke's blog. In it Professor Jonathan Wolff (University College London) asks an interesting question: Has the same ethical code of traditional journalism been mistakenly applied to science?

To better frame this, he describes a situation involving a philosopher of science, Naomi Oreskes, who has come to wonder the same thing. Oreskes had issued a report reviewing the scientific writings on global warming. Pretty standard practice. From Wolff's description, I'm led to believe that she left out a contrasting opinion ... saying the sceptics were largely members of independent thinktanks, sponsored, and less than objective.

After publishing this report in Science, Oreskes' work "was immediately shot down by bloggers, journalists and think-tankers, who mixed insults about her honesty with more plausible-sounding complaints about her methodology," Wolff writes. Seemingly because she chose not to include the view of the "skeptics".

It is with this that Wolff makes his point about the influence of the media on scientific discussion and review. He writes:

"Journalistic ethics require balance. In reporting political arguments, each claim must be countered so that a lively debate can take place and readers come to their own views (well, that's the theory). Oreskes suggests that journalists have mistakenly applied the same ethical code to scientific reporting. Whenever a story on climate change is produced, a maverick nay-sayer is rolled out for the sake of balance. But this misleads the public into thinking that a few lone voices have equal weight to the scientific orthodoxy.

The same thing happened when a scientific consensus was forming around the theory that HIV causes Aids. A small number of scientists questioned the hypothesis and received a disproportionate share of attention. The false appearance of wide scientific disagreement gave policy-makers in some countries an excuse to delay the introduction of prevention and treatment programmes, with tragic results.

How well equipped are we non-scientists to understand scientific discussions? We all study science for a few years, but learn - or at least remember - very little about methodology. Science is presented as a body of known truths. As adults, though, we need to know not the atomic number of chlorine, but how to assess evidence for or against a theory."

So where's the happy medium?