What 'Might' Be

This is an article from another blogger I read, talking about the problem with conclusions that leads to bad science and worse journalism.

In case you live under a rock and missed it, the World Health Organization recently announced that cell phones "may possibly" cause cancer.

Now, I'm neither a researcher or statistician, and personally think the jury is still out on this one. I'm not going to take sides.

But here is what I am pissed off about: Notice that the story said "may possibly" cause cancer. But the way we think, it somehow becomes "does cause cancer", and so we panic, and hold our cell phones a yard from our head, and scream into them (that's gonna make driving while talking into one a helluva a lot safer, huh?).

"I can't hear you, Dave, but at least I may possibly not get cancer."

In my opinion a lot of the way this stuff gets played up as the top story on news outlets is just bullshit. It's no different than if I put "SEXXX" in screaming letters at the top of this post. It sure as hell would get your attention, and snag a few search engines, but the post has little, if anything, to do with sex (unless you're into setting the phone on vibrate and...)

This is the nightmare of medical research in the lay press. Let's say Dr. Hodgkin does some research on rat ovarian cells. He finds that in 25% of rats with ovarian cancer, there is a gene that may be able to stop cancer spread.

So he gets published in the journal Genetics Research and Lab Decor. A hungry reporter finds the article, and sees a great way to sell papers with a story on how ovarian cancer has been cured!

Now this isn't what Dr. Hodgkin said. His research had a 25% success rate in curing mice with a certain type of ovarian cancer. The most he might say is that someday this might lead to new methods of treating some types human ovarian cancer.

But, of course, nobody gives a shit about mice with cancer. A headline saying "25% Of Mice with Ovarian Cancer May Someday be Cured!" wouldn't get anyone's attention. But if you make a huge leap of illogic, extrapolate it to humans, and put up "CURE FOR OVARIAN CANCER NEAR!", it will sell newspapers and draw readers, no matter how far off from the truth it is.

For those of you who remember, in the mid-80's there was a HUGE media circus about how Interleukin-2 was THE cure for cancer (an absurdity, if you think about it, considering that cancer isn't even a single disease- it's hundreds). Major news magazines and TV networks ran stories about it. It made the front page... and that was about it. Not to take anything away from Interleukin-2. It eventually did settle down and find a place in malignancy treatment. But was it the miracle breakthrough that it got played up as? Not even close.

By the same token, in the 1970's EVERYONE knew Saccharin caused cancer. So it got a big black box on every product that contained it. And after several years it was quietly found that it DIDN'T. Of course, when the second story came out it was relegated to the back page, and people didn't notice when the warning labels disappeared. Because it's more interesting to scare people, or give them false hope, than to reassure them.

Certainly there are plenty of things that are clearly proven to cause cancer: cigarettes, for example. But hell, at this point we all know that. So it's not going to get attention. But put up a headline about something we believe is harmless (unless you're trying to pass a cell phone talker on the freeway) and it will get a lot of readers.

So let's get back to the cell phones.

What really grates my crank is the use of "may possibly" or "possibly" or "may be linked to..." that the articles about this are so full of. NOT "does" or "doesn't" but simply different variations on ambiguity which, while getting your attention, DON'T REALLY SAY A FUCKING THING!!!

Look at it this way. "Cell phone use may possibly cause cancer". How is that different from "cell phone use may or may not cause cancer"? But if the second sentence was used, you'd say "No shit, Sherlock" and skip the article.

To take it a step further, let's use the "may possibly" phrase in other circumstances, and see how definitive that sounds:

"Mrs. Smith, you may possibly be pregnant."

"Dave, you may possibly be fired."

"You're going to see Dr. Grumpy? I heard he may possibly be competent."

"The Grumpyville Faceplants may possibly win the Super Bowl."

"Congrats, Cindy. You may possibly be getting a promotion."

"Dude! There may possibly be beer and girls at the party!"

"OMG Buffy! Your new boyfriend may possibly be HAWT!"

"KIDS! You may possibly be punished if you don't clean up your damn rooms!"

Doesn't give you a lot of confidence, or clarity, does it?

So next time you see a medical research news story, think about how accurate it may possibly be.

PETPEAVES

Every day during graduate school, I would park at the agriculture experiment station and walk the half mile or so to the Agriculture Building where I spent most of my days. Just across the street from the building where I worked was an attorney's office, and on the back of one of the cars was a bumper sticker I noticed every day and remember very vividly still now. It said, "Thou shalt not kill: go vegetarian".

I have often marveled on the irony of this statement. Here I was, a biochemistry major, studying in the agriculture college under the life sciences program, and this attorney thought plants weren't alive. Yes, I know plants don't seem to have feelings, but like I told some students a month or so ago, even they have blood. You just don't recognize it even though you lather your waffles in it at breakfast. It's called 'syrup'. The students were immediately grossed out by the notion.

For most of my life, I have been fully aware that plants are alive. If I am wrong, then everything I learned in college was a complete lie. I think what we really need in this nation is PETPEAVES: People for the Ethical Treatment of Plants Eaten After Violent Extraction from Soil. Plants cannot speak for themselves because they have no mouths or defend themselves because their weapons are not terribly useful against a predator with eyes (except for some cacti which are very good at dissauding any attempt at predation). Nobody represents their interests, and apparently some lawyers are active in the campaign against their rights. Without plants, all animal life on earth would cease.

Save the plants. Save yourselves. Join PETPEAVES.

**This post is mostly tongue in cheek, just for your information, but all the details are true as well as I understand truth**

Ripeness and Refractometers

One of our anatomy professors just informed me that he passed on something I taught him. While testing the specific gravity of their urine, a student asked him if a refractometer was useful for anything else. He remembered a conversation we had and pulled up a picture of someone using one in the wine industry, which is basically what I did in graduate school.

Refractometers can be used to tell ripeness of fruit. Indeed, I sometimes will use one at the market to test produce. Where I live there are a lot of foreign markets with produce of initially dubious value. I don't really know why they are selling 5kg of limes for $1. Are they bad? Did they buy too many? If I ask them in Italian, will they be able to explain it to me in Spanish? I just trust the refractometer.

Now, imagine what they see. A bearded male of Saxon ancestry pulls a refractometer and some plastic pasteur pipettes from his jacket. He squirts some juice on this lightsaber-looking thing and looks into it as he points it towards the light. Some fruit, he takes. Others he passes. It must look like something out of science fiction to them.

Well, it certainly is science. Using a refractometer to measure the Brix ratio (one degree approximates 1% sugar content and is relatively reliable as an indicator of sweetness), and pH paper to measure acids, one can tell almost exactly when fruit is at the perfect ripeness. As fruits mature, the sugars cease to be reducing, and the total amount of acids diminishes while sugars accumulate in the fruit. At an optimum range of sugar to acid ratio, a fruit is ripe and ready not only for harvest but for consumption.  Delicious!

As a practical matter, since you know I like practical science, this is a putative business model. You buy fruit if you live in the west hemisphere only once a week or more. You hope it will last on the counter until you need it and then only as much as you need to be ripe when you need it. With a refractometer, you could establish fruit in bins at various degrees of ripeness and classify fruit as 'ready now', 'ready within the week' and 'ready in more than a week' and thereby assist shoppers in planning their consumption without waste. Would it sell? I don't know. Could it? Most definitely. We have all seen people smelling mellons and scouring over berries, touching them all. No need for that. Science to the rescue!

You too could be like the wineries and know exactly when your fruits are ripe. Wouldn't that be nice?

For What Your Research Dollar Pays

I try to keep abreast when time permits at work with advancements in medicine and research. Partly, this was spurred because one of our electricians came to ask me about some stuff I did in graduate school. I was kind of taken aback, but not as much as I was about how completely unnewsworthy this research was.

According to the Journal "Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research" people who tailgate are more likely to get drunk than people who do not. Did they really need a study for that? Who got a PhD for this?

Don't even get me started on their 'scientific method'...

We conducted BAC tests of 362 adult attendees following 13 baseball games and three football games. We ran multivariate analyses to obtain factors associated with the risk of having a higher BAC.

Your tax dollars at work help some kid get an advanced degree. I could have told you this without collecting any data, but it's nice to know I'm right.

Bad Premise=Bad Science

I am not honestly surprised to read that the study linking autism to MMR vaccines is a fraud. The assumption is often made that the subjects are 'normal' when that is either a complete fabrication or when what we assume normal to be is far from it. Face it, there are really no 'normal' people. They might be 'normal' for something, but that's not necessarily the case.

I have seen a lot of people exclude outliers because they're too far from the normal. They might be the most interesting subjects.

When I worked in industry briefly, we had this 'standard' that we used in our R&D work. This person was supposedly normal, but the sample was for Factor V bloodwork, not for Trisomy 21. We assumed that the person was normal, but we really don't know.

In this case, the authors of the study purposely deceived people and used subjects who were not 'normal'. Besides that, they only studied 12 children? Please.

Don't accept their premise. It is useless to theorize until you collect the facts. Otherwise, you start bending the facts to match the premise, which is basically the underlying fault of all scientific endeavors of which I am aware. They start with a premise and then look for evidence. Too bad. People plan their lives around these findings, many of which prove false, and so we alter things that were just fine before we began.

Conventional Wisdom

I haven't written on here in a while, and it's really mostly a placeholder to prove that I came up with the idea first in case someone else tries to copy my idea.

However, I was reminded today of something from graduate school, and so I hearby invite you to join me as a member of the ASPCDSF: the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Dead Salad Fixings.

Across the street in graduate school was a small lawyers office. One of these lawyers had a bumper sticker on the back of his car that said, "Thou shalt not kill- go vegetarian."

If vegetables are not alive, then why are agriculture and plant physiology and similar majors considered part of Biology, the Life Science?

The lawyer probably saw himself as a crusader. I don't buy the premise. Lettuce is alive too, at least until I transfer it to the saline resistance chamber...