I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That (6 page)

In 1998 Dr Arpad Pusztai announced through the telly that genetically modified potatoes ‘caused toxicity to rats’. Everyone was extremely interested in this research. So what had he done in his lab? What were they fed? What had he measured? A year later the paper was published, and it was significantly flawed. Nobody had been able to replicate his data and verify the supposed danger of GM, because we hadn’t seen the write-up, the academic paper. How could anyone examine, let alone have a chance to rebut, Pusztai’s claims? Peer review is just the start; then we have open scrutiny by the scientific community, and independent replication.

So anyway, I wrote at the time that these cod liver oil people at Cardiff University were jolly irresponsible, that patients would worry, GPs would have no answers for them, and so on. This week I contacted Cardiff and said: This is what I said last year, now where’s the paper? Prof John Harwood responded through the press office: ‘Mr Goldacre is quite right in asserting that scientists have to be very certain of their facts before making public statements or publishing data.’ I’m a doctor, but it’s good to know we agree. If puzzling.

Bill the pelican being given a dose of cod liver oil by his keeper

‘Because of that,’ continued Prof Harwood, ‘Professor Caterson and my laboratory are continuing to work on samples.’ Right … ‘I’m afraid this takes a long time and much longer than journalists or public relations firms often realise. So, I regret he will have to be patient before Professor Caterson or myself are prepared to comment in detail.’ How kind. And only slightly patronising. I don’t want them to comment on fish oil. It’s seventeen months after ‘nature’s superdrug’: I just want to know where the published paper is.

In 2014, after being patient for a decade as requested, I contacted Prof Caterson and the Cardiff Press Office again. They confirmed that the research has never been published in a journal. Nobody can read or critique the methods or results, and the only public trace is a skeletal description describing a brief conference presentation. This document is four paragraphs long. The press release was seventeen paragraphs long. I’ll try them again in a decade.
¹

Academic Papers Are Hidden
from the Public. Here’s Some Direct Action

Guardian
, 3 September 2011

This week George Monbiot won the internet with a long
Guardian
piece on academic publishers
. For those who didn’t know: academics, funded mostly by the public purse, pay for the production and dissemination of academic papers; but for historical reasons, these are published by private organisations who charge around $30 per paper, keeping out any reader who doesn’t have access through their institution.

This is a barrier to the public understanding of science, and also to ongoing scholarship by people who’ve wandered away from institutional academia. There are open-access alternatives, where academics
pay up-front
and the paper is free to all readers, but these are patchy, and require your funder to pay £1,000 per paper. If the journal your work is best suited for doesn’t do open access, then you might reasonably accept a closed-access journal.

The arguments are big. What I find interesting is the recent rise of direct action on this issue.

Aaron Swartz
is a fellow at Harvard’s Center for Ethics, and a digital activist. He has been accused of intellectual property theft on a grand scale, and the
federal indictment document
, available in full online, describes an inspiringly nerdy game of cat and mouse.

Swartz denies all charges. Allegedly, he bought a laptop to
harvest academic papers from the website JSTOR
. Using a guest login at MIT – they last fourteen days – he set a program running to download papers in bulk. JSTOR and MIT smelt a rat: they blocked access to whole ranges of computers in MIT, creating havoc. Swartz set two computers on the job, running so fast that several JSTOR servers stopped working.

So then, allegedly, he tried a slower approach. You’ll have seen racks of flashing network equipment in office buildings. He opened one up in a quiet basement, plugged in a laptop with some external hard drives, hid them under a box, and left this package quietly downloading papers by the million. Months later he was seen returning, peering cautiously through cracks in doors, carrying his bicycle helmet over his face and looking through the ventilation holes. He was arrested and bailed for $100,000: he had downloaded 4.8 million academic papers.

It’s hard not to be impressed, and this is not the first time Swartz has taken public data access into his own hands. In the US, court records are available online, but at a cost, in a scheme generating a $150 million budget surplus. When free access was given at seventeen libraries, Swartz set up a script to harvest the lot. He got 19,856,160 pages before the system was shut down.

Now, the US government alleges that Swartz intended to release his vast academic paper stash for free on file-sharing websites. This may be true, but he did not do so. Shortly after his arrest, however, a posting appeared on the
Pirate Bay
website, declaring the release of an immense file, free for download. It contains thirty-three gigabytes’ worth of academic papers from the UK journal
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
. The release of this file, explained the poster, was an act of protest at Swartz’s arrest. The papers in it range from the seventeenth century up to 1923, and are mostly out of copyright.

These are, in some respects, remarkable tales of Robin Hood behaviour. JSTOR expended huge effort on scanning these
Royal Society papers
in the 1990s, when scanning was tougher than it is now, and it should be thanked. But it’s hard to believe we can’t find any better way of allowing public access to such documents: JSTOR sells each paper for between $8 and $19, while the Royal Society estimates that the pay-per-view income from the public accessing them is half of 1 per cent of its journal income.

One major problem with the current publishing model is that it’s hard to give access for free to the motivated public, while still gathering income from institutions. My hunch is that, at some stage, this problem may be partially sidestepped when someone manages an illegal workaround that individuals can play with, but which no university could endorse. I may be wrong, but either way, these are very interesting times for information.

In January 2013, facing up to thirty-five years in jail for downloading large quantities of academic papers, and under enormous pressure from US prosecutors, Aaron Swartz took his own life. He was twenty-six and extraordinary. A documentary from 2014 about Aaron’s life –
The Internet’s Own Boy
– is very good, very upsetting, and free to download online.

BIOLOGISING

Neuro-Realism

Guardian
, 30 October 2010

When the BBC tells you
, in a headline, that libido problems are in the brain and not in the mind, then you might find yourself wondering what the difference between the two is supposed to be, and whether a science article can really be assuming – in 2010 – that readers buy into some strange form of Cartesian dualism, in which the self is contained by a funny little spirit entity in constant pneumatic connection with the corporeal realm.

But first let’s look at the experiment the BBC is reporting.

As far as we know (the study hasn’t yet been published, only presented at a conference) some researchers took seven women with a ‘normal’ sex drive, and nineteen women diagnosed with
‘hypoactive sexual desire disorder’
. The participants watched a series of erotic films in a scanner, and while they did so, an MRI machine took images of blood flow in their brains. The women with a normal sex drive had an increased flow of blood to some parts of their brain – some areas associated with emotion – while those with low libido did not.

Dr Michael Diamond, one of the researchers,
tells the
Mail
: ‘Being able to identify physiological changes, to me provides significant evidence that it’s a true disorder as opposed to a societal construct.’
In the
Metro
he goes further: ‘Researcher Dr Michael Diamond said the findings offer “significant evidence” that persistent low sex drive – known as hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) – is a genuine physiological disorder and not made up.’

This strikes me as an unusual world view. All mental states must have physical correlates, if you believe that the physical activity of the brain is what underlies our sensations, beliefs and experiences: so while different mental states will certainly be associated with different physical states, that doesn’t tell you which caused which. If I do not have the horn, you may well fail to see any increased activity in the part of my brain that lights up when I do have the horn. That doesn’t tell you why I don’t have the horn: maybe I’ve got a lot on my plate, maybe I have a physical problem in my brain, maybe I was raped last year. There could be any number of reasons.

Far stranger is the idea that a subjective experience must be shown to have a measurable physical correlate in the brain before we can agree that the subjective experience is real, even for matters that are plainly subjective and experiential. If someone is complaining of persistent low sex drive, then they have persistent low sex drive, and even if you could find no physical correlate in the brain whatsoever, that wouldn’t matter: they still have low sex drive.

Interestingly, the world view being advanced by these researchers and journalists is far from new: in fact, it’s part of a whole series of recurring themes in popular misinterpretations of neuroscience, first described formally in a 2005 paper from
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
called
‘fMRI in the Public Eye’
. To examine how fMRI brain-imaging research was depicted in mainstream media, the researchers conducted a systematic search for every news story about it over a twelve-year period, and then conducted content analysis to identify any recurring themes.

The first theme they identified was the idea that a brain-imaging experiment ‘can make a phenomenon uncritically real, objective or effective in the eyes of the public’. They described this phenomenon as ‘neuro-realism’, and the idea is best explained through their examples, which mirror these new claims about libido perfectly.

So, an article in the
Washington Post
takes a view on pain, and whether the subjective experience of it is enough: ‘Patients have long reported that acupuncture helps relieve their pain, but scientists don’t know why. Could it be an illusion?’ It has an answer: ‘Now brain imaging technology has indicated that the perception of pain relief is accurate.’

Another article says that brain imaging ‘provides visual proof that acupuncture alleviates pain’. The reality, of course, is much simpler: for your own personal experience of pain, which is all that matters, if you say that your pain is relieved, then your pain is relieved (and I wish good luck to any doctor who tells his patient their pain has gone when it hasn’t, just because some magical scan says it has).

The
New York Times
takes a similarly strange tack in a brain-imaging study on fear: ‘Now scientists say the feeling is not only real, but they can show what happens in the brain to cause it.’

Many people find fatty food to be pleasurable, for the taste, the calories, and any number of other reasons. When a brain-imaging study showed that the reward centres in the brain had increased blood flow after subjects in an experiment ate high-fat foods, the
Boston Globe
explained: ‘Fat really does bring pleasure.’

They’re right, it does. But it’s a slightly strange world when a scan of blood flow in the brain is taken as vindication of a subjective mental state, and a way to validate our experience of the world.

The Stigma Gene

Guardian
, 9 October 2010

What does it mean to say that a psychological or behavioural condition has a biological cause? Over the past week, more battles have been raging over ADHD, after a paper published by a group of Cardiff researchers found evidence that there is a genetic association with the condition. Their study
looked for chromosomal deletions
and duplications known as ‘copy number variants’ (CNV), and found that these were present in 16 per cent of the children with ADHD.

What many reports did not tell you –
including that in the
Guardian
– is that this same pattern of CNV was also found in 8 per cent of the children
without
ADHD. So that’s not a massive difference.

But more interesting were the moral and cultural interpretations heaped onto this finding, not least by the authors themselves. ‘Now we can say with confidence that ADHD is a genetic disease and that the brains of children with this condition develop differently to those of other children,’
said Professor Anita Thapar
. ‘We hope that these findings will help overcome the stigma associated with ADHD.’