Reading assignments, vol. 9

This week's stuff is pretty heavily communication-themed; a lot of that is going around with the ScienceOnline 2013 deal having gone down. Anywhere, here's some general science enjoyment:

Chemophobia

• Chemophobia has been a major topic of the social-media-dom recently due to the ScienceOnline 2013 conference. In particular, Saturday marked the chemophobia-specific portion of the conference (Session 8A), which included a contemporaneous Twitter discussion via the hashtag #chemophobia. For those who had to work this Saturday (woo, columns, woo) the session notes have been posted online, and there's a quite impressive wiki entry containing an abundance of relevant and interesting chemophobia-related links and discussions.
• Michelle at The Culture of Chemistry has a thoughtful analysis of a recent chemophobia-rife New York Times story; she points to language and how it affects perception of concepts.
• Paul at ChemBark shares his tips and proposed strategies for how to combat chemophobia. It's a good read that sums up the origins and dangers of chemophobia pretty well. The recommendations are good, too: ACS should be doing its part (come on, guys!) but graduate students and faculty need to take it upon themselves to do outreach, regardless of the perceived waste of time. (That being said, the hostile intellectual atmosphere and the rough job market make spending any time on outreach seem unappealing to those trying to get as many ninth-author Tet. Lett. papers as possible published before graduating).
• Don't miss this latest Chemjobber podcast, wherein he discusses chemophobia and chemical communication with freelance writer/chemist Rebecca Guenard. 

Science communication

• See Arr Oh pokes fun at general features of chemistry blog entries.
• I found this guest post by Frank Swain both insightful and heartening. He writes of his UK-based BenchPress Project, which seeks, among other things, to have volunteer scientists give guest lectures to journalism students. The goal is to increase science and math (maths) literacy among journalists. I think it's a pretty important effort; even if scientists themselves try to do outreach and writing, journalists have the broadest audience and the means to reach them. Changes in science communication have to come from within both sectors!
• David Rubenson argues that despite a growing need for science communication, the quality of science communication has been in decline. He points to several symptoms (e.g. cluttered slides) and causative agents (e.g. overstretched researchers). I found significant his reference to two Nobelists who published infrequently (also, it reminded me of Daniel Day-Lewis).
• Always-interesting and often-controversial, Keith Kloor discusses the relative importance of general science literacy and news literacy. He argues for the importance of the latter (while not neglecting the former); in particular, he calls for news literacy to have a place in education. It shouldn't be an unfamiliar concept to scientists, who (should) be experienced at evaluating credibility of sources.
• UIUC anthropologist and science blogger Kate Clancy has an interesting piece (relevant to anyone who uses social media, especially those who write) about the pros and cons of filling out your online presence with your real identity.

Pseudoscience and denialism

• Notorious TV doctor Dr. Oz has received some negative limelight this week. Derek Lowe, for instance, responds to a recent New Yorker profile by commenting quite frankly (and accurately) on the gross degree of subjectivity and religiosity purveyed by Oz. Lowe is probably preaching to the choir, but he makes a very strong argument by pointing out that the institution of medicine, which is responsible for Oz's success, was decided not a post-modernist, choose-your-own-facts endeavor. Orac is not pleased, not surprisingly, and criticizes Dr. Oz's recent endorsement of homeopathy. In the vein of homeopathy, this video is relevant and amusing. Lastly, see this quick list of some downright wrong beliefs peddled by the good doctor.
• Moving from medicine to sports, read a brief account of some pseudoscientific nonsense from athletes.
• Amazingly, the teaching of evolution is still threatened by denialists the world over. It's a big problem in Turkey, for instance, where the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey has stopped publishing books that support the theory of evolution. Evolution has been in Turkey's crosshairs for a while. Meanwhile, here in the United States, we have Missouri House Bill 291 (titled the "Missouri Science Standard Act"). Read P.Z. Myers' breakdown of the legislation (which is in limbo). The bill is pretty frightening, pretty blantantly pro-creationism, and also terribly hypocritical. Also, Greg Laden points out a new anti-science bill in Arizona and the contrasting opposition to an anti-science bill in Montana.

Other

• This week Brandon Findlay has been running a series of posts about column chromatography. It's a good introduction or a good refresher, so give them a read.
• Derek Lowe has an interesting take on drug names (and how they've changed!).
• Neuroscientist Jessica Carilli makes the case for grad school in light of recent discussions of the unhealthy aspects of graduate study as well as the abysmal scientific job market.
• It's not infrequent to hear people complain about the uselessness of certain research programs, or at least to insist that they're too expensive (if the financial benefits aren't immediately obvious). Pete Etchells comments on NASA and the Curiosity rover, arguing against these viewpoints and giving some examples of how NASA technology has been repurposed for wide benefit.
• Maryn McKenna explores the poultry industry: specifically, how lack of transparency leads to unsustainable antibiotic use practices that contribute to widespread antibiotic resistance.

[Edit: I forgot Brandon Findlay's columns week! Urp!]

Pseudoscientist calls science dogmatic (surprise)

Bad Religion, to which bad science has been compared.
Source: Flickr (available via CC license)

In a post a couple of weeks ago on the HuffingtonPost blog, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake lamented what he regards as crippling dogmas in science (I'm relieved to see it placed in HuffPost Religion and not HuffingtonPost Science). The piece is titled: Why Bad Science is like Bad Religion. For reference, a photograph of Bad Religion is shown to the right.

The HuffingtonPost piece is a diatribe devoid of evidence. Says Sheldrake:

I have been a scientist for more than 40 years, having studied at Cambridge and Harvard. I researched and taught at Cambridge University, was a research fellow of the Royal Society, and have more than 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals. I am strongly pro-science. But I am more and more convinced that that the spirit of free inquiry is being repressed within the scientific community by fear-based conformity. Institutional science is being crippled by dogmas and taboos. Increasingly expensive research is yielding diminishing returns.

He starts off relatively normal; the argument that research is driven by conformity has been explored recently by writers including John Ioannidis. It's got truth to it. Grant funding is scarce, and grant proposals must draw heavily on literature precedent (putatively to show the money will not be wasted). Though this does select against potentially very innovative projects, some avenues exist to fund "startup" ideas (see NIH Challenge Grants for instance). And conformity has some utility: it would be very, very expensive to fund every single crazy idea--unsustainably so. This is a reason the federally-funded National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has received criticism and proposals for defunding. (NCCAM is part of the NIH! What??).

Next the punches at scientists begin to come out:

Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth. They believe that science has already solved the fundamental questions. The details still need working out, but in principle the answers are known.

Ah, the classic "science is as based on faith as religion is" argument. That's simplistic and shallow, of course, and many authors (including, obviously, Richard Dawkins) have countered this stale line of thought. Sheldrake seems to suggest that religious fundamentalists are more self-aware than scientists are--that they're more aware of their own limitations.

Since the 19th century, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Science will prove that living organisms are complex machines, nature is purposeless, and minds are nothing but brain activity. Believers are sustained by the implicit faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs. The philosopher of science Karl Popper called this stance "promissory materialism" because it depends on issuing promissory notes for discoveries not yet made. Many promises have been issued, but few redeemed. Materialism is now facing a credibility crunch unimaginable in the 20th century.

Here Sheldrake assumes that by following the scientific method, you remit yourself to cold nihilism, to blank materialism devoid of any joy or meaning. That's also ridiculous. As Douglas Adams has said: "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

And there is no such "credibility crunch". Scientific tools are cheaper and faster than ever before, and advances are rapid. Genome sequencing, for instance, is increasingly quick and affordable. Biology, "materialistic" as it may be, has grown from a descriptive endeavor to a broad arena utilizing information science, chemistry, systematics, physics, and more to rationalize life processes. If there is a credibility crunch, I'm missing what it is: science seems to be doing quite well.

The following is, however, the shakiest part of Sheldrake's argument:

Despite the confident claim in the late 20th century that genes and molecular biology would soon explain the nature of life, the problems of biological development remain unsolved. No one knows how plants and animals develop from fertilized eggs. Many details have been discovered, hundreds of genomes have been sequenced, but there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistry alone. 

The technical triumph of the Human Genome Project led to big surprises. There are far fewer human genes than anticipated, a mere 23,000 instead of 100,000. Sea urchins have about 26,000 and rice plants 38,000. Attempts to predict characteristics such as height have shown that genes account for only about 5 percent of the variation from person to person, instead of the 80 percent expected. Unbounded confidence has given way to the "missing heritability problem." Meanwhile, investors in genomics and biotechnology have lost many billions of dollars. A recent report by the Harvard Business School on the biotechnology industry revealed that "only a tiny fraction of companies had ever made a profit" and showed how promises of breakthroughs have failed over and over again. 

Despite the brilliant technical achievements of neuroscience, like brain scanning, there is still no proof that consciousness is merely brain activity. Leading journals such as Behavioural and Brain Sciences and the Journal of Consciousness Studies publish many articles that reveal deep problems with the materialist doctrine. The philosopher David Chalmers has called the very existence of subjective experience the "hard problem." It is hard because it defies explanation in terms of mechanisms. Even if we understand how eyes and brains respond to red light, the experience of redness is not accounted for.

Here Sheldrake commits one of the biggest anti-science sins: worship of gaps. This is what anti-evolutionists say, too: "There are unexplained gaps in the fossil record!" "We don't have records of every fossil!" "Why aren't there transitional forms?" Science hasn't failed to explain biological development. We know a lot about it. And there aren't any big insurmountable walls. The picture keeps getting filled in. And the extension of heritable biology beyond simple genetics is illustrative of life's complexity: it isn't a case for adoption of magic and psychic nonsense.

Sheldrake says "there's no proof that consciousness is merely brain activity": but importantly, he neglects that there's no proof for anything supernatural.

I admit I'd never heard of Sheldrake before reading this piece, which I learned of when it was shared by a nutritionist I follow on some social media website. Who is this guy? I wondered. Should I know of him? Is this a Harvard biologist I hadn't heard of? Maybe a tenured professor at a smaller school who's big in the education field, or in science writing? The bottom of the article made him sound reputable: (but yes, they spelled it "resaerch")

Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., is a biologist and author of Science Set Free. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University, where he was Director of Studies in cell biology, and was Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Resaerch Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Hyderabad, India. From 2005-2010 he was Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, funded from Trinity College, Cambridge. His web site is www.sheldrake.org.

The problem is, Huffington Post made him sound like an actual real-live scientist. I guess he is indisputably an author. But his credentials, as outlined on his website, are spotty (not that non-traditional career paths are bad); it's interesting that he is crying out against dogma, yet he lists his most traditional posts in the article to establish his identity.

Sheldrake did indeed get his PhD from Cambridge and was initially regarded as a promising student. But he has, for all intents and purposes, parted ways with the scientific community. His career started out well (he was a Crick student and a fellow at Cambridge), but he ventured into the realm of magic with his 1981 publication of the book A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Causative Formation. Scientists quickly recognized the work as unscientific, but Sheldrake held onto his ideas and has for the last 31 years been in conflict with, you know, real biologists.

For a more thorough analysis of his career, read this account.

Is his work really that far out? Is it really unscientific? Is he being unfairly pilloried by dogma-loving, chauvinistic power-hungry capitalist traditional hegemonically dominating scientists? Is his critique of science as prejudiced and fear-driven justified?

Nah, he's way off base. His "science" consists of self-promoting, mystic, pseudoscientific nonsense that preys on the superstitions of the uninformed. From his own website, his research areas include: unexplained powers of animals; experimenter effects; morphic fields; the sense of being stared at; telepathy.

My personal favorite: "Can you wake a sleeping animal by staring at it?"

Before someone yells "continental drift!" at me: there's a big difference between someone being shunned for crazy theories without evidence and someone being shunned for theories with evidence. Science is self-correcting, and the dogmas shift over time. If there are facts and analysis to back it up. Sheldrake has not provided the extraordinary evidence (or any evidence) that extraordinary claims require.

He touts his publication record: early on he had some high-profile papers doing actual science (such as a 1968 paper in Nature) but his last few decades have been dominated by fringe-science journals like the Journal of Scientific Exploration and the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake
Source: Wikipedia/Public domain.

So is Sheldrake taken seriously by non-biologists? The problem is: he seems to be. We live in a society that loves Dr. Oz and thinks alternative medicine is an equally valid alternative to evidence-based therapy. So not suprisingly, there are a variety of fawning articles, reviews, and interviews. One piece proposes that Sheldrake may be a modern-day Isaac Newton. And several of his books have sold very well, according to Amazon stats.

As I previously mentioned, the article grossly misrepresents Sheldrake's credentials and area of "expertise". He calls himself a biologist, but that's a bit of a stretch. Sheldrake is more well-known for his parapsychology research and doesn't appear to have recently held a job that we would consider being a "biologist" for any appreciable amount of time.

Shrouding pseudoscience in science's clothing is a common tactic; shame on Huffington Post for not being clearer about who Sheldrake really is. When pseudoscience and actual science are blurred (especially by those who claim to be scientific experts), a great harm is done to the public good and the advancement of scientific thinking.

In final response to Sheldrake's points: of course there is dogma in science.* Of course there's resistance to change. But it's not in the things he's suggesting (he confuses how science works with what science says). And science, unlike religion, is self-correcting; views change over time, and they change broadly across the field. We don't have a thousand subsciences that conflict with each other, insisting the others are doomed to burn for eternity in Tetrahedron Letters.

* One such dogma is that n = 1 is sufficient for comparing the yields of two reactions. "Putting in LiCl raised the yield from 89% to 92% and the ee from 91% to 96%". Yeah, no it didn't.

Wheatgrass: "Creat" your own reality!

Wheatgrass juice being made. Credit: Wikipedia.
Image available via Creative Commons license.

I've found the idea of wheatgrass funny for a while now. Pseudo-health stores that dress up fruit/sugar concoctions as 'health drinks' by throwing in a spoonful of nutritional supplement dust have become popular recently, and they all seem to peddle the privilege of drinking shots of wheatgrass juice. For a fee ($2-$3), you can get a bunch of grass squeezed into juice by a machine (itself a few hundred dollars) and then drink it. Cows consume grass, too, but it's free for them and then we turn them into delicious beef.

Proponents of wheatgrass juice basically think it's a nutritional panacea. But a lot of the health claims (i.e. it contains lots of vitamin B₁₂, which is an important vitamin that is found in meat and so vegans don't usually get enough) are dubious (i.e. turns out the B₁₂ content is negligible). There's not a lot of scientific literature on the effects of wheatgrass (PubMed lists only 2 random controlled trials involving wheatgrass, for instance). But most evidence seems to suggest that wheatgrass is no better or worse than any green vegetable. It's just trendier.

Lack of evidence doesn't stop the marketing people. One of my favorite wheatgrass companies is Pure Intentions, who not only sell the stuff to local smoothie shops but also operate a School of Energy (a "diverse spectrum of holistic and energetic facilitators and teachers for all ages and levels"). Their website contains all sorts of cringe-worthy pseudoscience/bad-science goodies.

Let's take a look at what Pure Intentions says about their product (red comments are mine)

"What is Wheatgrass?
Wheatgrass is the young grass of wheat grown from the red winter wheatberry seed. The fresh-squeezed juice of the grass produces high concentrations of chlorophyll, active enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. It is true that 1oz. of wheatgrass juice has the nutritional equivalent of 2-1/2 lbs. of green, leafy vegetables. [no--it doesn't--Dole, for instance, points out that spinach is much richer in nutrients. and pressing it into juice to concentrate it is kind of cheating] It is one of the richest natural sources of vitamins A, B complex, B-17, C, E, & K. Additionally, it is an excellent source of calcium, potassium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, sodium, sulfur, cobalt, zinc, as well as 17 forms of amino acids and enzymes." [apparently 'excellent source' doesn't mean much, since it's got 1% DV of calcium/magnesium/phosphorus but 413% DV zinc]

Here is where it gets good:

"Why is Chlorophyll important? [why did you capitalize it? why?]  
Chlorophyll, which makes up over 70% of the solid content of wheatgrass juice, is the basis of all plant life and closely resembles the molecular structure of human red blood cells. [...] Chlorophyll is the first product of light, containing more light energy than any other element. [make it stop. make it stop.] It can be extracted from any plant, but wheatgrass is superior because it has been found to have over 100 elements needed by the human body." [it has over 100 elements? I'm pretty sure you're obligated to include thallium and lead and stuff by that point...]

What?

Chlorophyll A and human red blood cells
displaying remarkable structural similarity.
Credit: RBC Image is in the public domain.

Hey guys! Chlorophyll is THE BASIS of all plant life! Forget amino acids, carbohydrates, lipids, and nucleic acids.

And as depicted in the figure to the left, they're correct. Chlorophyll certainly does resemble human erythrocytes.

My favorite jam-packed sentence: "Chlorophylll is the first product of light, containing more light energy than any other element." Digest that one for a second. Pretty high cringe efficiency. Personally, I've never noticed the "element" chlorophyll on the periodic table, but then again--I'm an organic chemist, so if it's in the transition metals or lanthanides, I probably ignored it. And what is "light energy"? Photons? It has photons? In... a bucket? Where does it keep the photons? It's remarkable that chlorophyll is the "first product of light"; turning all those photons into carbon and nitrogen must be hard work.

Chlorophyll is important, of course, in the process of photosynthesis (which is a pretty cool process). It's what the authors are trying to hint at, though even if you fix the inaccuracies photosynthesis is irrelevant to human nutrition. We can't digest chlorophyll. So regardless what nice things you might say about it, it's useless as a supplement.

The website also proclaims the abundance of enzymes in wheatgrass:

"Enzymes play an important role in many bodily functions including vision, thought, reproduction, breathing, and digestion, just to mention a few. The enzymes found in wheatgrass have been found to supplement the indigenous enzymes manufactured in the human body."

This leaf also contains chlorophyll, and for $200 you can
probably make it into a trendy organic drink.
Source: my own work. I totally found that leaf.

This is, of course, nonsense. Enzymes are nature's catalysts, and with rare exceptions they are proteins. All organisms need enzymes to function--they catalyze diverse functions from translation of RNA to metabolism to immune responses to cell signaling. But we make our own diverse set of highly specialized enzymes, and each organism's enzymes are typically different from other species, genera, orders, and so on. So ingesting a bunch of wheatgrass enzymes doesn't give you mystical powers of wheatgrass. In fact, your body won't even use them. Since enzymes are proteins, they are digested indiscriminately in the stomach, along with all other protein. Congratulations: you've made some ordinary amino acids. Simply put, ingesting enzymes confers no health benefit.

I encourage you to read the rest of what they say; there's more delightful puzzles in there. The growers make a bunch of health claims, tell you that wheatgrass is so potent it'll give you nausea, and advise you to cleanse your palate with a lemon afterwards (maybe because grass is disgusting).

$3 worth of wheatgrass. Source:
Pure Intentions website

Like I said earlier, there's not a lot of scientific literature behind the wheatgrass juice phenomenon. So most of what is put out is hype--a mixture of novelty, optimism, and marketing. There may be health benefits (it's a vegetable, after all). But wrapping anything up in pseudoscience is dishonest and does a disservice to gullible customers. It's not the chlorophyll; in case your biology is rusty, humans can't photosynthesize or even digest the molecule. It's not the enzymes (hello, denaturing environment of the stomach).

Wheatgrass juice is an example of one of those areas where anecdotes carry more emotional weight than conventional medicine. This phenomenon has been written about before (see Denialism by Michael Specter for a good read in this area). It's interesting, and something we have to be aware of as scientists. As pitifully adorable as the glaring pseudoscience above is, it's actually effective in reaching people. We might have science on our side, but they have marketing.

Added note: check out their recently added "cat grass" (vets seem to support this) and "floral grass." I especially like the tagline: "Creat your own reality!"

Creat your own reality! Source: Pure Intentions website.