Science is not an opinion

The President of the United States has just announced that pregnant mothers who take paracetamol (Tylenol) can cause autism in their babies, an opinion with no scientific basis whatsoever.

And yet, oddly, the fact that the president of the most scientifically advanced nation in the world blurts out such a flawed statement has probably failed to shock you. After all, well, he’s Donald Trump: either he's a fool, or he's pretending to be one.

Of course, this is only an opinion (which does not mean it is wrong). One could argue that he has landed the job of most powerful man on the planet for a reason. That his stupidity is just a clever front just to distract us, to curry favor with a segment of the population already fed up with not understanding the world, and, deep down, he's smarter than anyone else.

There is no doubt that presidents, Nobel laureates or billionaires are people of extraordinary capabilities. But do our powerful always respect reason and science? And if not, does it matter? The question is relevant because, unlike our medieval ancestors, today we can choose who governs us; we could choose empathetic people, seekers of truth, justice and the common good.

We could. So... how do we explain these stories?

"A country renounces genetics"

In August 1948, a universal assembly of the USSR's Academy of Agricultural Sciences enthroned Trofim Lysenko's doctrine as "the only correct theory". Curious, because Lysenko claimed that genes were "a bourgeois invention", and that plants could be trained to become another species.

In essence, he was selling a retreaded version of Lamarckism (1801): "the giraffe stretches its neck to reach higher... its offspring will be born with a longer neck". In other words, simultaneous rejection of Darwin and Mendel... in 1948, no less, only five years away from the Watson-Crick-Franklin discovery of the DNA double helix.

Stalin bought the story: with a few tricks (vernalization of seeds, training of crops...) Soviet agriculture would revive and miraculous harvests of "new wheat" would arrive, propelling the paradise of the proletariat towards unparalleled levels of progress and happiness. The president of the Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, protested, and was rewarded with a cell in Saratov prison where he died of starvation. Lysenko succeeded him, genetics was outlawed in the USSR, and more than 3,000 scientists were removed from office, jailed, or executed.

But despite the strenuous efforts of thousands of ideologically pure scientists, nature did not seem to comply. The "cold-soaked" seeds did not rewrite genetic inheritance, the Mendelian laws just carried on, and Soviet agriculture stagnated. Without applied science (genetics, plant pathology...), productivity could not take off, and although this was not the only cause of the overall failure of Soviet agriculture, it was an own goal of historical proportions.

With the death of Stalin (1953), discussing Lysenkoism ceased to be taboo, and scientists could begin to show other opinions (which is not to say that you didn't end up sweeping snow in Siberia). Actually, Russian science did not fully recover from this journey into the heart of the dumb darknessuntil the 1980s.

"A government denies HIV."

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, South African President Thabo Mbeki embraced the idea that HIV did not cause AIDS, blaming it instead on poverty and malnutrition, in a toxic mix of scientific ignorance and spurious correlations.

* Spurious correlation: when two things seem related, but they are not, or their relationship is not cause-effect, as in this example:

Mbeki first convened a Presidential Advisory Panel in 2000 that included notorious AIDS deniers (such as American Peter Duesberg) but also orthodox scientists – and all were treated equally. Once it was established that quacks deserved the same attention as scientists, the president of South Africa started publicly echoing denialist arguments. At the International AIDS Conference in Durban in July 2000 – on global stage – Mbeki stunned the world by asserting AIDS was a syndrome of immune collapse from poverty, not a virus, and warned against “toxic” Western drugs. 

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, of course (which does not mean they are all equally valid). The problem came when those opinions became national policy: the government delayed the arrival of antiretroviral drugs and instead promoted vitamins, garlic, lemons, beets. The result was a health catastrophe that Harvard researchers estimated at more than 330,000 preventable deaths, and some 35,000 babies born with AIDS who could have been protected.

It would be licit to think (as in the case of Trump) that behind the facade of stupidity and superstition the South African president was hiding some clever economic logic - perhaps a bargaining mechanism with big pharma? But in 2000 the drug nevirapine (prevention of mother-to-child transmission) was offered to them for free... and the government restricted it to pilot projects for years.

And so, while neighboring countries like Botswana rolled out antiretroviral treatments and reduced mortality, South Africa lagged behind, and its people died like flies.

"A president talks to a dead dog."

May 1988: the world discovers that the President of the United States and his wife consulted almost every decision with their astrologer.

Fortune teller Joan Quigley (an Aries) had been on retainer for Ronald Reagan (an Aquarius) for seven years, and his horoscope readings had decided his travels, debates, presidential plane takeoffs and landings, State of the Union addresses, and more; whole blocks of dates in the presidency were flagged as “very bad,” “no trips,” “stay home”. Famously, Quigley even decided the site of a summit with Mikhail Gorbachev (a Piscis); according to her, Washington was astrologically “mediocre to poor”, but Reykjavik “fantastic” (the summit happened in Reykjavik).

Meanwhile, in Paris... François Mitterrand (a Scorpio) was perhaps a more sober character than former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan, but he shared his need to read the stars in order to govern. For years he consulted astrologer Élisabeth Teissier (a Capricorn) before serious decisions: when to start the First Gulf War, the date of the Maastricht referendum... Teissier even prepared for him the astrological chart of Saddam Hussein (a Taurus) to help him decide the best way to pulverize Iraq.

Even Canada's longest-serving prime minister, the highly respected architect of the Canadian welfare state William Lyon Mackenzie King (a Sagittarius), was a stalwart of spiritualism. His diaries reveal consultations with mediums to speak with his parents Elizabeth and John (Aquarius and Virgo respectively), the late U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (another Aquarius), Leonardo da Vinci (an Aries), historic Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier (a Scorpio), and even his first dog, Pat the terrier (a Gemini).

"A public agency researches the power of prayer."

After gorging himself on bee pollen pills, Senator Tom Harkin was convinced that they had cured his chronic allergic rhinitis. "It’s the most bizarre thing that ever happened to me," he told reporters. Enthused, he got Congress to approve the creation of the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) to "support research into alternative and complementary practices using scientific methods."

OAM was renamed NCCAM in 1998, and NCCIH in 2014. The name changed, the objectives remained the same, and budgets increased from a few million to nine-digit figures annually. By 2009 it had burned through some $2.5 billion, without a single miracle to report. Today, NCCIH consumes $170 million a year.

Shockingly perhaps, the controlled clinical trials did not validate any of the proposed alternative therapies. And some of them were really spectacular:

• "Biofield/energy healing": Reiki, Healing Touch, amethyst effects, "distance healing", Kirlian cameras, etc.
• A study of prayer healing (short- and long-distance) in patients with glioblastoma.
• Aromatherapy for wound healing (lavender/lemon inhalations).
• Coffee enemas for pancreatic cancer.
• Magnets to treat arthritis, carpal tunnel and migraine.

All these, and many others, failed to yield repeatable results when tested under double blind conditions, and in February 2009, Harkin declared before a Senate committee that “one of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has fallen short…”

One might think that the project was colossally futile from the start, and that even Pat the dead terrier could have foreseen the outcome - although this is also an opinion (which is not to say that some opinions are not true as a temple).

"A Nobel Prize winner goes nuts"

Linus Pauling was not just "a smart person"; he was the only person to have won two unshared Nobel prizes. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he became convinced that megadoses of vitamin C could prevent colds, cure cancer and basically fix almost anything. He himself was popping 3,000 mg/day, the equivalent of about 80 tangerines.

He claimed that terminal cancer patients lived longer with high-dose vitamin C; in 1970 he published Vitamin C and the Common Cold, detailing how mega-dosing vitamin C could heal pretty much anything… and the americans just went vitamin-crazy; a year later, sales of vitamin pills had gone up tenfold, and by the mid-70s over 50 million americans were regularly swallowing vitamin supplements. The media and public ate it up – after all, if a genius like Pauling said it, it had to be true, right? 

Only it wasn’t; the human body can’t absorb that much Vitamin C, at least not orally – it just pees out the excess, so whatever was healing his patients wasn’t Vitamin C. His results had come, actually, from cooking up the studies: they were not randomized, not double blind, and were conveniently “edited” to exclude a few deaths. Under these conditions, Pauling had linked things that seemed to relate… but didn’t. And we’re back to spurious relations! I love those!

In the late 1970s and 1980s, controlled clinical trials - real science - broke it all down: the Mayo Clinic tested oral vitamin C in advanced cancer, and it performed the same as placebo. Subsequent research confirmed that vitamin C does not prevent cancer or colds. The medical societies dismissed it and, ironically, Pauling died of cancer in 1994 (his wife did too, years earlier).

Another Nobel laureate, Luc Montagnier (controversial co-discoverer of HIV), went so far as to claim that DNA emits electromagnetic signals that imprint its mark in water and that this "memory" would allow it to reconstruct the original molecule, in a bizarre cocktail of telekinesis and homeopathy. He added that disorders such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or autism were due to these "waves" emitted by DNA.

While these claims may not be any weirder than things that actually happen in the world of biology, or quantum physics, none of his claims could ever be substantiated by an experiment, nor could he ever reproduce them.

Was it true? Was it a lie? Well, everyone is entitled to their opinion (which doesn't mean some opinions aren't nonsense).

"A king wastes your money."

A royal family wasting public money is something you may or may not find shocking – everybody is entitled to their own opinion, of course (which doesn’t mean some opinions aren’t but repackaged medieval superstition), but this one was a major scandal.

For decades, England's King Charles III (then Prince of Wales) lobbied the U.K. government to sponsor homeopathy, those ultra-diluted remedies utterly refuted by science. By law, the Royal Household cannot influence politics, but Charles simply "cared too much" about his subjects; in a series of letters dubbed "black spider letters" after Charles peculiar calligraphy, the now-king pushed for NHS funding of homeopathy, despite protests from the scientific community.

Partly because of King George VI’s patronage, the NHS had homeopathic hospitals and publicly funded homeopathic prescriptions since its creation in 1948 (yes, the year in which the USSR renounced genetics). And in the 2000’s, when scientific scrutiny threatened to cut funding to unproven therapies, Charles tried to protect his beloved homeopathy at all costs. 

Their constant "lobbying" activity even financed homeopathic clinical trials at the taxpayer's expense and - allegedly - their pressure and that of their associated organizations even silenced official reports denouncing "pseudoscience". Charles' speeches resonated among a whole segment of the population that distrusted (and still does) big pharma, with slogans of "complementary medicine" and "treating the whole person" (curiously enough, the same slogan as the NCCIH. Yes, the "pray to cure brain tumors" guys).

But there wasn't much of a turnaround. After more than 60 years of tolerating it, in 2010 the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee declared homeopathy "scientifically implausible" and criticized its funding. In 2017, the NHS announced that it would stop paying for homeopathic prescriptions: "at best a placebo and a misuse of scarce funds."

"Stop calling it an opinion."

Science is not an opinion. We know this, and in the most cultured society in history it is clear that if we tolerate the rule of ignorance it is not because we are ignorant - an excuse that was perfectly valid in medieval Europe - but, more likely, because we are saturated.

With infinite information blasted in our faces 24/7, it would seem that we have developed a collective attention deficit that prevents us from calling out even the boldest lies. Saying "well, it's your opinion" is cheaper than making the intellectual effort to seek the truth, which would involve thinking about something for more than two minutes and, worse, taking a stand.

Yes: some opinions are better than others. Some ideas are more complex, more profound, more solid. There are those who have worked for years to formulate scientific (or artistic) concepts that bring us closer to discovering the truths of existence, allowing us to better organize our society. And not that they aren't frequently wrong: gross errors such as Thalidomide, or corruption cases such as the opioid epidemic, reveal that both Academia and the medical industry are far from perfect. But, as a general rule, we can take it for granted that science's misdeeds are not usually revealed by presidents or princes, but rather by the tireless work of the institutions and people who are dedicated to it.

Let's give our attention to these people, then. And, above all, let's not tolerate those who piss on millennia of science and culture simply because we dare not stand up for intellectual rigor, curiosity, and the search for truth. Does that make sense?