Bad Science

also less able to recognize competence in others, because this, too, relied on ‘meta- cognition’, or knowledge about the skill.

That was a pop-psych distraction. There is also a second, more general point to be made here. Journalists frequently flatter themselves with the fantasy that they are unveiling vast conspiracies, that the entire medical establishment has joined hands to suppress an awful truth. In reality I would guess that the 150,000 doctors in the UK could barely agree on second-line management of hypertension, but no matter: this fantasy was the structure of the MMR story, and the MRSA swab story, and many others, but it was a similar grandiosity that drove many of the earlier examples in this book where a journalist concluded that they knew best, including ‘cocaine use doubles in the playground’.

Frequently, journalists will cite ‘thalidomide’ as if this was investigative journalism’s greatest triumph in medicine, where they bravely exposed the risks of the drug in the face of medical indifference: it comes up almost every time I lecture on the media’s crimes in science, and that is why I will explain the story in some detail here, because in reality – sadly, really – this finest hour never occurred.

In 1957, a baby was born with no ears to the wife of an employee at Grunenthal, the German drug company. He had taken their new anti-nausea drug home for his wife to try while she was pregnant, a full year before it went on the market: this is an illustration both of how slapdash things were, and of how difficult it is to spot a pattern from a single event.

The drug went to market, and between 1958 and 1962 around 10,000 children were born with severe malformations, all around the world, caused by this same drug, thalidomide. Because there was no central monitoring of malformations or adverse reactions, this pattern was missed. An Australian obstetrician called William McBride first raised the alarm in a medical journal, publishing a letter in the Lancet in December 1961. He ran a large obstetric unit, seeing a large number of cases, and he was rightly regarded as a hero – receiving a CBE – but it’s sobering to think that he was only in such a good position to spot the pattern because he had prescribed so much of the drug, without knowing its risks, to his patients. By the time his letter was published, a German paediatrician had noted a similar pattern, and the results of his study had been described in a German Sunday newspaper a few weeks earlier.

Almost immediately afterwards, the drug was taken off the market, and pharmacovigilance began in earnest, with notification schemes set up around the world, however imperfect you may find them to be. If you ever suspect that you’ve experienced an adverse drug reaction, as a member of the public, I would regard it as your duty to fill out a yellow card form online at yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk: anyone can do so. These reports can be collated and monitored as an early warning sign, and are a part of the imperfect, pragmatic monitoring system for picking up problems with medications.

No journalists were or are involved in this process. In fact Philip Knightley – a god of investigative journalism from the Sunday Times’ legendary Insight team, and the man most associated with heroic coverage on thalidomide – specifically writes in his autobiography about his shame over not covering the thalidomide story sooner. They covered the political issue of compensation, rather well (it’s more the oeuvre of journalists after all) but even that was done very late in the day, due to heinous legal threats from Grunenthal throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Medical journalists, despite what they may try to tell you, most certainly did not reveal the dangers of thalidomide: and in many respects it’s difficult to picture a world in which the characters who produce bogus MRSA hoax stories could somehow be meaningfully engaged in monitoring and administering drug safety, ably assisted, perhaps, by ‘leading experts’ from their garden sheds.

What the MRSA episode reveals to me, alongside a gut-wrenching and cavalier grandiosity, is the very same parody that we saw in our earlier review of nonsense science stories: humanities graduates in the media, perhaps feeling intellectually offended by how hard they find the science, conclude that it must simply be arbitrary, made up nonsense, to everyone. You can pick a result from anywhere you like, and if it suits your agenda, then that’s that: nobody can take it away from you with their clever words, because it’s all just game-playing, it just depends on who you ask, none of it really means anything, you don’t understand the long words, and therefore, crucially, probably, neither do the scientists.

Epilogue

Although he was a very pleasant man, from my first telephone conversation with Chris Malyszewicz it was immediately clear that he lacked the basic background knowledge necessary to hold even a rudimentary discussion about microbiology. Patronising as it may sound, I feel a genuine sympathy for him, almost as a Walter Mitty figure. He claimed to have consulted for ‘Cosworth-Technology, Boeing Aircraft, British Airways, Britannia Airways, Monarch Airways, Birmingham European Airways’. After BA and Boeing, neither of which had any record of any dealings with him, I gave up contacting these organisations. He would send elliptical comments in response to detailed criticisms of his ‘analytic techniques’, such as they were.

Dear Ben,

As a quote:

‘I am surprised, but knowing what I know am not and knowing what I mean’.

Thanks,

Chris

I have strong feelings on this story: I do not blame Chris. I am certain that the true nature of his expertise would have been clear to anybody who spoke with him, regardless of background knowledge, and in my view it is the media that should have known better, with their huge offices, chains of command and responsibility, codes of conduct and editorial policies: not one man, in a shed in his back garden, surrounded by kitchen fittings and laboratory equipment he barely understood, bought on bank loans he was struggling to repay, in a small conurbation just outside Northampton.

Chris wasn’t happy with what I wrote about him, and what was said about him after the story was exposed. We spent some time on the telephone, with him upset and me feeling, in all honesty, quite guilty. He felt that what was happening to him was unfair. He explained that he had never sought to be an expert on MRSA, but after the first story the journalists simply kept coming back, and everything snowballed. He may have made some mistakes, but he only wanted to help.

Chris Malyszewicz died in a car accident after losing control of his vehicle near Northampton shortly after the MRSA stories were exposed. He was heavily in debt.

Many years later William McBride turned out to be guilty, in an unfortunate twist, of research fraud, falsifying data, and he was struck off the medical register in 1993, although he was later reinstated.

The Media’s MMR Hoax

The MRSA swab scandals were a simple, circumscribed, collective hoax. MMR is something much bigger: it is the prototypical health scare, by which all others must be judged and understood. It has every ingredient, every canard, every sleight of hand, and every aspect of venal incompetence and hysteria, systemic and individual. Even now, it is with great trepidation that I even dare to mention it by name, for two very simple reasons.

Firstly, at the quietest hint of a discussion on the subject, an army of campaigners and columnists will still, even in 2008, hammer on editors’ doors demanding the right to a lengthy, misleading and emotive response in the name of ‘balance’. Their demands are always, without exception, accommodated.

But there is a second issue, which is less important than it seems at first: Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who many imagine to be at the centre of the story, is currently in front of the GMC on charges of professional misconduct, and between me finishing and you reading this book, the judgement will probably be out.

I have no idea what that judgement will be, and being honest, although I suppose I’m glad they look into things like this in general, cases like his are two a penny at the GMC. I have no great interest in whether one individual’s work was ethically dubious: the responsibility for the MMR scare cannot be laid at the door of a single man, however much the media may now be trying to argue that it should.

The blame lies instead with the hundreds of journalists, columnists, editors and executives who drove this story cynically, irrationally, and wilfully onto the front pages for nine solid years. As we will see, they