Richard Feynman once said "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." That’s somewhat at odds with current thinking, I’d say.

This week, Amazon released their pick of the science books of 2008. I was very chuffed to find out that 13 Things has made it in at number 8. But what was really interesting is that the seven before it were all written by academics. In fact, the only hack in the top 10 besides me was Carl Zimmer.

I get the sense, from conversations with publishers and agents, that the book industry thinks it’s better to get its science straight from the horse’s mouth. Big name academics are a bigger draw to the public that journalists writing about science. In one sense, I can understand that.

But I also find it worrying (and not just because I don’t like competition). It is, I think, part of the process that I see creeping up on the science industry: the death of the critical voice.

I’m not going to go big on this just yet, as I want to dig into it properly at some point in the near future. But here’s something to think about. It’s an extract from Paul Feyerabend’s 1975 essay How to Defend Society Against Science:

 “In society at large the judgement of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgement of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago…. Pursue this investigation further and you will see that science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Do not be misled by the fact that today hardly anyone gets killed for joining a scientific heresy. This has nothing to do with science. It has something to do with the general quality of our civilization. Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has to offer.”

In other words, if you're getting your science from scientists, you're perhaps not getting the whole story. Which is exactly what 13 Things is all about.

In honour of the news that UK home office is encouraging all police officers to carry Taser guns as standard equipment, I’d like to issue a warning. If you can avoid it, don’t get tasered. It’s awful.

I was, as far as I am aware, the first person in the UK to take a 50,000 volt hit from a Taser gun. It hurts. A lot.

I did it as a stunt, really. It was 2001, and the Metropolitan police had just announced they were going to trial the Taser. I got in touch with the man testing it out for them, Anthony Bleetman, a consultant heart surgeon based in Birmingham. "Come on up," he said – "You can Taser me. That’ll be good for your story.

Tasers fire two barbed darts with trailing wires. The voltage across the darts interferes with the central nervous system, and – unless you’re special forces or on drugs – it’s pretty hard to stand up when the shock is hitting. Basically, a Taser makes you fall down.

By the time I (and the photographer) got to Birmingham, Bleetman had changed his mind. “Instead,” he said, “why don’t I Taser you?” I could think of plenty of good reasons, but the photographer was there, and there might have been a blank page in New Scientist if I chickened out. So I said OK (the story is here). Reluctantly, I might add – I don’t generally do stupid things.

In an anonymous, curtained room in the hospital, Bleetman and a colleague took a medical history, pinned the darts to me (I’d seen them fired, and frankly wasn’t confident they’d hit where Bleetman intended. Neither was Bleetman). They altered the shock time from the default 5 to 0.5 seconds counted to three, and pressed the trigger.

I crumpled to the floor, and two seconds later I got up again. The photographer wasn’t sure he’d got it, and asked if we could do it again.

I said no. I felt fine, but I vowed there would be no police-baiting in my future.

As I said, my shock only lasted for half a second, while the default setting on the guns is ten times as long. That would be horrific. And the idea that people might get multiple blasts – such as the one that got Taser into legal hot water – is pretty scary, as is the statement that they might be used to enforce obedience, rather than just contain violence. At a press conference, Richard Brunstrom, chief constable of North Wales Police, tasered himself and then said it was the consequence of disobeying a police officer. That’s not what they’re for, is it, Richard?

They’re also not for intimidating certain sectors of the community: two-thirds of the Met’s deployment has been on black people. Perhaps that’s why the Met has said today it won’t be increasing its Taser deployment – it knows there is enough of a problem with mistrust of police officers.

Having said that, being a police officer can be pretty scary, so I’m not one of those people that think it will be a bad move to equip them with Tasers. Used wisely, it’s like mace or other non-lethal weapons: an option. And, I have to say, I’d rather be shot with a Taser than with a bullet. Not that I’ve been shot with a bullet – but the fact that I wouldn’t volunteer for that tells you something, surely?

 
I’m back from New York now, and wondering where my jet lag ended and that oh so predictable British winter lethargy kicked in. I’m one of those people who functions better with a charge from a lightbox, and the time has most definitely come to be using it.

Seasonal Affective Disorder is all in the mind, of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real – it’s like placebo. I was interested when I visited a neuroscientist at University College London and saw that he has the same lightbox model as me. I asked him if he thought it was actually a placebo. “Who cares how it works?” he said, laughing. “It works - that's enough for me.”

Actually, there’s evidence to show it has a biochemical effect (as there is for placebo; when will we stop saying "just a placebo" as if it wasn't a powerful effect?). Last year, a paper in – wait for it – Neuropsychopharmacology showed that it’s to do with serotonin (the happy molecule) being removed from cells too efficiently. In those who suffer from winter depression, the serotonin transporter molecule is getting on for twice as active as it should be. The removal rate returns to normal levels in summer, but can be slowed down in winter by light therapy. There’s a New Scientist story about the study here.

I’ll get round to blogging about my experience of talking at the Hayden Planetarium very soon, but – well, you know: I’m seasonally affected, aren’t I? There’s something pleasingly poetic about a sluggishness that results from overactive serotonin transporter molecules. Those babies are really going for it. No wonder I’m so tired…
 

I’m writing this in the culmination of several events. First, I had a great chat with John Horgan this afternoon for a Bloggingheads TV slot – it will be posted on Saturday 8th. I’ll be on a plane then, coming over to New York to see some friends, and to give a couple of talks – one at the Hayden Planetarium (which I’m very excited about) and one at John’s university, Stevens (which will be fun too).

Anyway, we talked about 13 Things stuff, obviously, but we also talked about today’s fantastic election result. I’m sitting at my office desk watching a fireworks display out of the window – today is our celebration of Bonfire Night, and nowhere does it better than Lewes, my home town (check out these pictures if you don’t believe me). But there’s gonna be plenty of celebrations going on right now in America too, I have no doubt.

In Lewes, bonfire night is about celebrating tolerance - mostly religious tolerance, because of the 17 protestant martyrs burned at the stake here in the 16th century. Obama’s election is also about the emergence of tolerance: listening to his acceptance speech, one couldn’t help but see how far America has come in terms of racial equality. I’m sure there’s more to be done, but as the man said, you have to respect the progress so far.

The optimism Obama brings is a youthful one: it makes everyone feel full of hope and that is a beautifully rejuvenating feeling. Interestingly, John said during our conversation, the combination of Obama’s election and reading a quote from Charles Darwin at the end of 13 Things filled him with an optimism for the future of science - that it's not all sewn up, and maybe there really are revolutions to come. And this from the man who literally wrote the book on Science’s demise!

This is the quote:

“I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine… I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality.”

The future direction of science belongs to the next generation of scientists. I like to think this is inspiring to the scientists who are in the generation that came out so effectively in support of Obama. Theirs is the political future – and the scientific future too. Hope springs eternal. Today, at least.
 

Here's a couple of pictures of the craft that will find strong evidence for life on Mars. I hope.

One of the things I have never understood is the view that there probably isn’t life on Mars. Surely, in the age of extremophile bacteria, it would be odd if there weren’t something there beneath the arid surface?

A couple of new results strengthen my conviction. First up a paper in Science that reports the discovery of organisms that live independently of the sun. Instead, they get their energy from natural radioactivity in the basalt rocks where they live. The organisms live 3 to 4 km down a South African gold mine, in water trapped in a crack.

The radioactive uranium in the rocks breaks up water molecules to produce hydrogen gas. The microbes use this to turn sulphate molecules, also in the rock, into hydrogen sulphide – basically a mimic of photosynthesis, but powered by radioactivity not sunlight. Read more about it here. It’s enough to make you think that life is a cosmic imperative, as Christian de Duve once suggested. Wherever there is chemistry and the release of nuclear energy (which is everywhere), something conspires to create that process we call life. Maybe it’s just the laws of physics at work.

All of which makes it even more exciting that NASA are now thinking of searching for biologically-generated methane again, more than 30 years after Gilbert Levin did it for the Viking mission. In 13 Things I’ve written about his results: positive, but, essentially, shouted down by the (false) negative of another experiment. When the Mars Science Laboratory launches next year (that's the aeroshell in the picture), it might finally vindicate his claims.

There is new evidence that methane is being given off in “hotspots” on Mars. Methane is often (not always) a result of biological processes, such as microbial processing of nutrients. This is what Levin claimed to see in 1976.

A Nature News story says methane clouds spanning hundreds of kilometres form over these hotspots. It seems to be created at an astonishingly fast rate, indicating the possible presence of methane-generating bacteria.

One of the hotspots was on the longlist of landing sites for the MSL lander, but didn’t make the shortlist. That decision is now being revisited. Since MSL can detect the ratio of carbon isotopes in methane, that might give good indication of a biological origin for the gas. Terrestrial biology produces more carbon-12 than any other isotope: if the Martian methane is rich in carbon-12, it’s a strong suggestion that Gil Levin was right all along.


 

 

 

 

Here’s two stories that make disturbing reading for anyone interested in scientific progress. First, the New York Times reports on the Nobel Prize’s nearly-man. Douglas C. Prasher did the work to isolate a jellyfish gene that produces a fluorescent protein. This was the subject of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. However, the prize went to the three chemists who used the discovery, rather than to Prasher.

The article makes it clear that Prasher is not bitter about this, but I am. Not for the lack of recognition, but because Prasher is now driving a van for a living. He couldn’t get the research grants to go on doing the science he wanted to do, so is now earning $10 an hour as a courtesy van driver in Huntsville, Alabama.

Science (or rather science’s administrative support system) has a knack of squandering talent. In the cold fusion chapter of 13 Things I related how Melvin Miles, a hard-working and hard-thinking researcher lost his job after associating himself with the subject. (I’ve recently learned – here – that Miles is now very much back in business again, which is great news).

Which brings me to the second story. A report in Science tells how the National Institutes of Health is bringing in a two-strikes-and-you’re-out policy on grant applications. If you can’t please the reviewers with one set of tweaks, pack up and go home (and get a job driving a courtesy van).

The problem is, the peer review system relies on human beings manifesting extraordinary – and frankly unreasonable – levels of altruism. Many professional scientists will tell you from experience that the reviewers of grant proposals are not disinterested parties: they are often in some kind of competition with the applicant – for status, if not for funds. Having only one chance to gainsay their criticisms (or, to put it another way, to give the reviewers a much better chance of burying the competition) doesn’t make it any easier to get a project funded, of that you can be sure.

The NIH says it is overwhelmed by the amount of admin involved in processing multiple versions of an application. I can understand that, but hasn’t the cart just moved in front of the horse? The process of science is essentially a twisted, convoluted search for discovery, and working out the best approach to making discoveries is similarly twisted, requiring iterative back and forth between everyone qualified to comment. The support system for science has to allow for that. What’s next? Grant applications that are written on a postcard so as to minimise the administrators’ time wasted opening envelopes?

I wonder if Prasher prefers driving a van to jumping the hurdles required to make world-changing discoveries. I also can’t help wondering if the soul-destroying and time-guzzling process of applying for research funding means that he was always working in a drudge job for less than $10 an hour anyway…

 

Dan Ariely of Duke University in North Carolina won an Ig Nobel prize last week for showing that expensive placebos work much better than cheap ones. People who believed that the pills they were given cost $2.50 each reported feeling less pain from a series of electric shocks than people who thought their pills had been discounted to 10 cents each.
 
The Ig Nobels are traditionally meant to celebrate humorous but essentially pointless science – other winners this year included researchers who had proved that Coca-Cola douches do not provide effective contraception and University of New Mexico psychologists who proved that lapdancers make more tips when in the most fertile periods of their menstrual cycle.
 
However, the placebo research is far from pointless. It illustrates a point that leading researchers are only just beginning to acknowledge, and could have implications for clinical practice, the regulation of complementary medicines and the way we conduct clinical trials of pharmaceuticals.
 
We have long known that belief and expectation play a powerful role in the biochemistry of the human body, but the placebo effect is a much more powerful and mysterious phenomenon than we have been led to believe.
 
As I outlined in 13 Things…placebo researchers have learned, for instance, that diazepam doesn't reduce anxiety in patients after an operation unless they know they are taking it (it's not yet clear if this is also true of diazepam's other effects). National Institutes of Health researchers have shown that cocaine abusers who know they are receiving the drug can get by on half the amount required by those given a covert dose. If you don't tell people that they are getting an injection of morphine, you have to inject at least 12 milligrams to get a painkilling effect, whereas if you tell them, far lower doses can make a difference. This has obvious implications for the way we run clinical trials.
 
It turns out that Ariely  (check out his web page here – it’s crazy and intelligent stuff) may not even have needed to deceive his subjects into thinking they were getting a medicine at all, whether cheap or costly. It is possible to bypass common sense with the placebo effect. When, as part of research for 13 Things… I asked researchers to elicit a placebo response in me, they had no trouble doing it. Even though I knew I was being tricked, the placebo conditioning procedure still allowed me – like Ariely’s subjects – to experience a series of electric shocks as nothing more than a light touch on the arm. (I blogged about this for New Scientist here.)
This is a potentially useful discovery, allowing doctors to bypass the ethical problems of deceiving patients. Researchers at the University of North Carolina have shown, for instance, that ADHD-affected children can manage on reduced stimulant medication – reducing side-effects – when given a placebo. The twist is, the children, the doctors and the parents all knew they were using something with no active ingredient, but it worked anyway. Such “open-label” use of placebos holds great potential for improving health care, the researchers say.
 
Ariely’s findings could help lay to rest one of the great arguments of modern science: whether homeopathic remedies and other complementary medicines have any medical benefit above placebo. Science has struggled with the question because there are indications in the literature that these interventions do have some effect beyond what the placebo effect can explain. But now that we are beginning to understand that placebo response depends on previously unexplored factors like perceived cost of the medicine (and homeopathic medicines are certainly not cheap), perhaps we can find a way out of this quagmire.
 
Add in the idea that some chemicals are only efficacious when in contact with the chemicals our bodies produce when we have our hopes raised, and we start to see that we have some seriously murky waters to explore before we can claim to understand how and why many medical interventions work – or don’t. The placebo effect is not at all as we have imagined. And it is certainly not that funny.

 

I was unbelievably cheered by the news that the Large Hadron Collider has a helium leak. Not because I’m a nasty person, but because I’ve experienced so many of these myself. It’s just nice to know even the big guns can’t get it right all the time.

During my PhD research (that's NOT me in the picture), I had to operate a cryostat that cooled samples of superconducting metal down to 0.3 Kelvin (-272.7 celsius). To do this, you first cool to 77K with liquid nitrogen, which is fairly easy, and then you get down to 4.2K with liquid helium. (For me, the final stage was to use helium-3 to get down to 0.3K, but the LHC doesn’t need to do that).

SO MANY TIMES, I’d spend a couple of days getting my cryostat down to liquid helium temperatures only to find that an electrical connection somewhere in my experiment couldn’t handle the contraction due to temperature, and dropped off, making the whole rigmarole of cooling a colossal waste of time. Then I’d have to let the thing warm up again – another day or two. Only then could I get the experiment out, do the repairs and start the whole process of evacuating and cooling the apparatus again.

At the LHC, it seems they had the same problem on a bigger scale. The spokesperson said, “the most likely cause seems to be a faulty electrical connection between two of the magnets which probably melted, leading to a mechanical failure.”

Unfortunately for the LHC people, it takes two months, not a few days, to warm up, repair, and then recool their experiment. But the point is the same: doing science can be difficult, frustrating and – dare I say it – sometimes boring. Many people who read the news reports about the LHC’s problems will be aghast that they have lost two months, and consider this a major failing. It’s not, it’s just the way it is. The exquisite knowledge we gain from modern physics experiments comes at a high price: it’s cutting edge stuff, and thus expensive and, above all, time-consuming. But ultimately worth it, if the results of past experiments are anything to go by. It’s amazing how much we know about the universe from past accelerator experiments. The only particle of the standard model of physics we haven't yet seen is the Higgs boson, and that might not be hidden for long.

So, for the record, I’m still excited by the LHC. And now I’m empathetic too…
 

Just read my children a fantastic picture book. They’ve heard the story many times, so it’s lost its impact, but every time an adult hears it for the first time, they are truly shocked.

It’s called Tadpole’s Promise (it’s on Amazon) and….I don’t want to spoil it, actually,  so I’m not going to tell you what happens. But it deals with the fact that a tadpole’s change into a frog and a caterpillar’s change into a butterfly are automated processes, impossible to resist, and as predetermined as the fact that a frog will always … oops, I nearly gave it away. Anyway, it’s fascinating ending because kids love the story and adults invariably hate it.

I found myself wondering whether that’s because it exposes a prejudice that means nothing to children and everything to adults. For most children, free will is not an issue because their needs are generally met externally, they live within social structures where they follow the rules, for the most part, and it is possible for them to act on most of their desires without adverse consequences. (I remember being totally shocked by Margaret Boden suggesting in a lecture that young children (under 5s, say) are not truly conscious beings because of the simplicity/naivete of their cognitive processes and experiences. I don’t like it, and I don’t agree, but I kind of know what she means).

Adults, on the other hand, feel they have more responsibility. And so they are blessed/cursed with the sense that they have choices to make. But do they? Really, I mean?

Neuroscientists tell us we don’t have anything like free will. In New Scientist a while back, Patricia Churchland, a neuroscientist based at the University of California, Davis, discussed this subject, opening with a startling anecdote:

In 2003, the Archives of Neurology carried a startling clinical report. A middle-aged Virginian man with no history of any misdemeanour began to stash child pornography and sexually molest his 8-year-old stepdaughter. Placed in the court system, his sexual behaviour became increasingly compulsive. Eventually, after repeatedly complaining of headaches and vertigo, he was sent for a brain scan. It showed a large but benign tumour in the frontal area of his brain, invading the septum and hypothalmus - regions known to regulate sexual behaviour.

After removal of the tumour, his sexual interests returned to normal. Months later, his sexual focus on young girls rekindled, and a new scan revealed that bits of tissue missed in the surgery had grown into a sizeable tumour. Surgery once again restored his behavioural profile to "normal".

Churchland goes on to ask, “Did the man have free will? Was he responsible for his behaviour? Can a tumour usurp one's free will?” Sexual desires, she points out, are regulated by hormones that act on neurons in the septum and connected brain areas. Where does this leave us with personal responsibility? You can access a PDF of the article via the “articles” page of her website (it’s subscription only on newscientist.com).

Every time I discuss the issue of free will, people (including me) try to wriggle out of the inescapable conclusion that we are carbon-based machines that are controlled by a lump of carbon-based jelly sited in the skull. This jelly sends out chemical and electrical signals that do all kinds of interesting things, including giving us the illusion that something inside our heads is separate from the physical stuff – a soul, or mind, or whatever you want to call it – and allowing us (whatever “us” is) to direct the body and thoughts.

It’s a nice idea, but it doesn’t really add up, does it? Like the grown-up tadpole who ate his childhood sweetheart (OK, there you go), we follow stimuli, and obey the drives and impulses set out by our genes and our experience.

But, also like the frog, we’re  best off thinking that there’s nothing amiss. So feel free to ignore this post if you want. As Steven Pinker has put it, “free will is a fictional construction, but it has applications in the real world.”
 

OK, 13 Things… has been out for a month today. It’s been really interesting to do interviews for the US and Canadian media (from afar, by phone, often at strange times of day) and hear the reactions. It’s been overwhelmingly positive – many people have said how much they enjoyed the book. A few (I won’t name names) didn’t seem to have read it and just asked me to monologue about it, rather than trying to have a discussion. Then there’s the callers…I wasn’t quite prepared for the first question I got on Coast to Coast, which was “are ghosts the quantum remnants of people?” How do you begin to answer that?

In fact, the interest in the paranormal, UFOs, crystal healing and quantum connections between people among listeners has taken me by surprise. To be honest, I have little to say about these subjects in connection with the book – it’s just not that kind of book. I’ve had a couple of angry emails from people who think I really should be more engaged with these issues. But, frankly, I don’t think science can say anything helpful. At least, not that they want to hear.

Many of the interviews have been hugely enjoyable discussions with people who got to grips with the questions the book raises about the ways in which science progresses (and doesn’t). Some have been pretty scary in their cross-examinations – this one at amateurscientist.org, for example – but that’s good. Why should I get an easy ride?

It’s also gratifying that nterest seems to be spread right across the spectrum of topics. Sex, Free Will and the Missing Universe probably come out on top, but there’s been lots of chances to talk about the other chapters too, particularly placebo, Viking, and the Wow! Signal.

Homeopathy, predictably, stirs up a lot of scepticism as a subject alongside these others. This has been reflected in the reviews too: the Discover review said the title should be “12 Things That Don’t Make Sense and Homeopathy, Which Is Just Silly”. That made me laugh out loud. And Paul Di Filippo’s review on BarnesandNoble.com made a similar point. “All 13 bafflers strike me as worthy of the attention -- save for the final chapter's mystery of homeopathy.” His reason? “The likely fallout from solving the conundrum of that practice's reputed effectiveness simply doesn't attain the magnitude of the other items.” Coming in the middle of a beautifully favourable review, I’ll take that on the chin. I did struggle to know whether to include homeopathy, but that was because of the difficulty of finding reliable indications that it is a phenomenon whose effects exceed that of placebo. (The fact that placebo is so hard to pin down too helped homeopathy’s case enormously!).

So, where did I go wrong? What’s your favourite chapter, if you’ve read the book? And what should I have left out/included that I didn’t? I’d be genuinely interested to know the reasons behind your sentiments.