Bad Science

classic Temptations: ‘When a group of farm workers find that the bank intends to foreclose on their property, they console each other with a succession of steamy romps.’ This might go some way to explaining the ‘pert breasts’ angle of his ‘new research’.)

I spoke to friends on various newspapers, proper science reporters who told me they had stand-up rows with their newsdesks, trying to explain that this was not a science news story. But if they refused to write it, some other journalist would – you will often find that the worst science stories are written by consumer correspondents, or news generalists – and if I can borrow a concept from evolutionary theory myself, the selection pressure on employees in national newspapers is for journalists who compliantly and swiftly write up commercial puff nonsense as ‘science news’.

One thing that fascinates me is this: Dr Curry is a proper academic (although a political theorist, not a scientist). I’m not seeking to rubbish his career. I’m sure he’s done lots of stimulating work, but in all likelihood nothing he will ever do in his profession as a relatively accomplished academic at a leading Russell Group university will ever generate as much media coverage – or have as much cultural penetrance – as this childish, lucrative, fanciful, wrong essay, which explains nothing to anybody. Isn’t life strange?

‘Jessica Alba has the perfect wiggle, study says’

That’s a headline from the Daily Telegraph, over a story that got picked up by Fox News, no less, and in both cases it was accompanied by compelling imagery of some very hot totty. This is the last wacky story we’ll do, and I’m only including this one because it features some very fearless undercover work.

‘Jessica Alba, the film actress, has the ultimate sexy strut, according to a team of Cambridge mathematicians.’ This important study was the work of a team – apparently – headed by Professor Richard Weber of Cambridge University. I was particularly delighted to see it finally appear in print since, in the name of research, I had discussed prostituting my own reputation for it with Clarion, the PR company responsible, six months earlier, and there’s nothing like watching flowers bloom.

Here is their opening email:

We are conducting a survey into the celebrity top ten sexiest walks for my client Veet (hair removal cream) and we would like to back up our survey with an equation from an expert to work out which celebrity has the sexiest walk, with theory behind it. We would like help from a doctor of psychology or someone similar who can come up with equations to back up our findings, as we feel that having an expert comment and an equation will give the story more weight.

It got them, as we have seen, onto the news pages of the Daily Telegraph.

I replied immediately. ‘Are there any factors you would particularly like to have in the equation?’ I asked. ‘Something sexual, perhaps?’ ‘Hi Dr Ben,’ replied Kiren. ‘We would really like the factors of the equation to include the thigh to calf ratio, the shape of the leg, the look of the skin and the wiggle (swing) of the hips … There is a fee of ?500 which we would pay for your services.’

There was survey data too. ‘We haven’t conducted the survey yet,’ Kiren told me, ‘but we know what results we want to achieve.’ That’s the spirit! ‘We want Beyonce to come out on top followed by other celebrities with curvy legs such as J-Lo and Kylie and celebrities like Kate Moss and Amy Winehouse to be at the bottom e.g. – skinny and pale unshapely legs are not as sexy.’ The survey, it turned out, was an internal email sent around the company. I rejected their kind offer, and waited. Professor Richard Weber did not. He regrets it. When the story came out, I emailed him, and it turned out that things were even more absurd than was necessary. Even after rigging their survey, they had to re-rig it:

The Clarion press release was not approved by me and is factually incorrect and misleading in suggesting there has been any serious attempt to do serious mathematics here. No ‘team of Cambridge mathematicians’ has been involved. Clarion asked me to help by analysing survey data from eight hundred men in which they were asked to rank ten celebrities for ‘sexiness of walk’. And Jessica Alba did not come top. She came seventh.

Are these stories so bad? They are certainly pointless, and reflect a kind of contempt for science. They are merely PR promotional pieces for the companies which plant them, but it’s telling that they know exactly where newspapers’ weaknesses lie: as we shall see, bogus survey data is a hot ticket in the media.

And did Clarion Communications really get eight hundred respondents to an internal email survey for their research, where they knew the result they wanted beforehand, and where Jessica Alba came seventh, but was mysteriously promoted to first after the analysis? Yes, maybe: Clarion is part of WPP, one of the world’s largest ‘communications services’ groups. It does advertising, PR and lobbying, has a turnover of around ?6 billion, and employs 100,000 people in a hundred countries.

These corporations run our culture, and they riddle it with bullshit.

Stats, miracle cures and hidden scares

How can we explain the hopelessness of media coverage of science? A lack of expertise is one part of the story, but there are other, more interesting elements. Over half of all the science coverage in a newspaper is concerned with health, because stories of what will kill or cure us are highly motivating, and in this field the pace of research has changed dramatically, as I have already briefly mentioned. This is important background.

Before 1935 doctors were basically useless. We had morphine for pain relief – a drug with superficial charm, at least – and we could do operations fairly cleanly, although with huge doses of anaesthetics, because we hadn’t yet sorted out well-targeted muscle-relaxant drugs. Then suddenly, between about 1935 and 1975, science poured out an almost constant stream of miracle cures. If you got TB in the 1920s, you died, pale and emaciated, in the style of a romantic poet. If you got TB in the 1970s, then in all likelihood you would live to a ripe old age. You might have to take rifampicin and isoniazid for months on end, and they’re not nice drugs, and the side-effects will make your eyeballs and wee go pink, but if all goes well you will live to see inventions unimaginable in your childhood.

It wasn’t just the drugs. Everything we associate with modern medicine happened in that time, and it was a barrage of miracles: kidney dialysis machines allowed people to live on despite losing two vital organs. Transplants brought people back from a death sentence. CT scanners could give three-dimensional images of the inside of a living person. Heart surgery rocketed forward. Almost every drug you’ve ever heard of was invented. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (the business with the chest compressions and the electric shocks to bring you back) began in earnest.

Let’s not forget polio. The disease paralyses your muscles, and if it affects those of your chest wall, you literally cannot pull air in and out: so you die. Well, reasoned the doctors, polio paralysis often retreats spontaneously. Perhaps, if you could just keep these patients breathing somehow, for weeks on end if necessary, with mechanical ventilation, a bag and a mask, then they might, with time, start to breathe independently once more. They were right. People almost literally came back from the dead, and so intensive care units were born.

Alongside these absolute undeniable miracles, we really were finding those simple, direct, hidden killers that the media still pine for so desperately in their headlines. In 1950 Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill published a preliminary ‘case-control study’ – where you gather cases of people with a particular disease, and find similar people who don’t have it, and compare the lifestyle risk factors between the groups – which showed a strong relationship between lung cancer and smoking. The British Doctors Study in 1954 looked at 40,000 doctors – medics are good to study, because they’re on the GMC register, so you can find them again easily to see what happened later in their life – and confirmed the finding. Doll and Bradford Hill had been wondering if lung cancer might be related to tarmac, or petrol; but smoking, to everybody’s genuine surprise, turned out to cause it in 97 per cent of cases. You will find a massive distraction on the subject in this footnote.

The golden age – mythical and simplistic though that model may be – ended in the 1970s. But medical research did not grind to a halt. Far from it: your chances of dying as a middle-aged man have probably halved over the past thirty years, but this is not because of any single, dramatic, headline-grabbing breakthrough. Medical academic research today moves forward through the gradual emergence of small incremental improvements, in our understanding of drugs, their dangers and benefits, best practice in their prescription, the nerdy refinement of obscure surgical techniques, identification of modest risk factors, and their avoidance through public health programmes (like ‘five-a-day’) which are themselves hard to validate.

This is the major problem for the media when they try to cover medical academic research these days: you cannot crowbar these small incremental steps – which in the aggregate make a sizeable contribution to health –