Is Science Under Siege? Complicated Times, Complicated Questions

You know, we're in a very interesting time in history, aren't we, in which the concept of science and what is truth and what is knowledge and what can we feel confident about is under siege to some extent across all the boundaries of knowledge. And I was really kind of struck when I saw this most recent issue of arguably one of the top science journals, Science magazine. And the lead editor was brought up the question, and the title of it is Imagine a World without Facts. Let me just sink in for a second. Imagine a World without Facts. Now, what is he bringing up? I mean, clearly we think there are facts, but there is a move afoot right now, as really has been seen by Latour in some of his philosophical writings, that there is this resistance that people have now to science as being a purveyor of facts, that it's just another social communication tool for getting conjecture and ideas out. But there's no difference between a scientific bit of information and a speculation on the street corner of someone who's come up with an idea the night before. Because it's all just social convenience and dislanguaging certain things and making something seem more formal than others. Is that really where we are? Well, this editorial by Jeremy Berg is really very, very powerful because it talks about the fact that what is science and what are facts. It's really a way of defining what we consider to be reproduc and transferability. It's not a religion, it's not kind of we worship at the altar of science, but rather it's just a way, it's a measuring stick for evaluating the transferability of observations from one person to another, so that the science gives you a way of actually grading whether it's worth your time becoming skilled in that art, to know it'll do the same thing on your hands as it would somebody else. And so we get these laws of nature, these kind of maxims, these tools that become predictive that allow us to put people on Mars eventually, or at least go to the moon and do things that you consider quite impossible if you didn't have some reproducibility guidelines. Well, I happened to then follow up reading this editorial with a meeting that I was invited to attend that was truly transformative. It was hosted by Ruth Westreich at her home. A couple hundred individuals were invited for this salon. Salon comes from the French word that was archetypically a woman's group to spread information and to seek truth and to enlighten with opinion leaders in the field that could share their ideas. So a Salon is really a truth seeking type of distribution instrument. And that's what this was all about. And it was a special salon focused on a gentleman who has raised quite a bit of attention. In fact, if you wikipedia him you'll find this is Dr. Giles Serolini and he is in France. And you'll actually, if you wikipedia him you'll find that there is the Seralini affair. And what is the affair? It relates to his discovery doing studies in animals in ex vivo and cellular based studies that the herbicide Roundup he found to be potentially carcinogenic. In fact, I would say beyond potentially, he found it to be carcinogenic. And that was published in a very well respected environmental health journal, toxicology journal later, only to be retracted. It was retracted because it was suggested that he had falsified the data, it wasn't true, and so forth and so on. That led into what has now been a multi year project in which the attempts to try to understand why this article was retracted because the information was not false eventually led to the recognition that the new journal editor of that journal who was put in place by Monsanto, had the kind of editorial scissors to cut that article out and to have it retracted. Seralini then has gone to court over the years six different times with Monsanto in which he has won all six of these court cases. So that the Seralini affair is really a two account affair. What is truth in science? What documentation do you need to prove a hypothesis? And secondly, is there a higher order that has an alternative agenda that can exercise and to editorialize and can remove from public consumption information based on their bias? And this is really incorporated in a recent book that was translated out of the French into English, just available now, called the Great Hell Scam. This is by Professor Seralini and a French chef who worked in collaboration with him, Jerome Du Soleil. And in this particular book they really talk about the origin of this whole concept that the herbicide Roundup was in fact contributing. And it's just one of many, many substances for which there's residue in our foods that may have problematic impact on our both immune system and our neurological system. So this immunotoxicology and relationship also to neurotoxicology. So with that in mind, I'm sitting there thinking about all this and what appear in the Journal of the American Medical association, their internal medicine copy version in this last month's issue is none other than an article whose title is association of Frequency of Organic Food Consumption with Cancer Risk. Findings from the Nutrinet Sante Prospective cohort study. And in this paper, if you haven't heard about it, I'm sure you will because it's received quite a bit of attention. The authors conclude from this fairly extensive review of the literature, and I quote, a higher frequency of organic food consumption was associated with a reduced risk of cancer. Although the study findings need to be confirmed, it does lead to origins of food consumption in the general population having a potential risk to cancer through these residues. So this is a very, very interesting next step right in trying to address the question what is truth, what is fact, what is real, what is not real? And in fact, there's a couple of very interest op ed pieces that have followed up on this one in the New York Times entitled can eating organic food lower your cancer risk? In which they point out that organic food reducing residues was associated with on these statistical association studies as published in JAMA, a 25% lower in overall cancer diagnoses, especially for cancers, lymphoma and breast cancer, soft tissue cancers. So as we're starting to look at these relationships, we recognize that the Environmental Protection Agency has been stripped much of its ability to do good science, that there's a demythologizing going afoot here to try to take facts and to make them into mythology and seem as if they're just the same as anybody else's opinion. There is this whole movement towards the fact that we don't really have truth of information in things like global, global warming. I think that as we come back to the reality of what is truth, we need to go back and really look at what are the foundations of how our society has grown up and become the extraordinary society that has fought back against things that were the major cause of death of previous generations before the age of sanitation, hygiene, nutrition, before we had medical diagnosis and treatment, before we had an understanding of disease, before we understood the physical sciences in a way that we could predict outcome. All of this becomes an extraordinary part of our future. So I think when we tie this all together, we can see it's time to really hold the standard high. It's time to fight back against disinformation and it's time enough to take an apologist seat against those who say, well, it's all a matter of opinion, isn't it? No, some opinions are better than others when they're based on fact.