May the farce be with you

Nancy K. McGuire

These days, there is no shortage of scientific and technical information of questionable pedigree. Advertisements for miracle vegetable extracts promise overnight weight loss. Scientists at the national laboratories are accused of conducting all kinds of nefarious experiments. Each new day brings a fresh e-mail deluge of computer virus warnings. Where does the nonspecialist go to get the "straight scoop" on all things technical? If my next-door neighbor asks me for my learned opinion on the latest rumor, is there a ready source of high-quality answers?

I got to thinking about this after watching the movie Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. In one scene, the wise if somewhat unconventional Jedi knight Qui-Gon Jinn takes a blood sample from the young Anakin Skywalker, ostensibly to check for infection in a wound. His real motive is to measure the concentration of "midichlorians" in Skywalker's bloodstream. A high concentration of these symbiotic life forms is a prerequisite for candidacy to the Jedi knighthood, because it is these microbes that confer a knowledge of The Force. Not content to leave the mysteries of the spiritual realm unexplained, Steven Spielberg et al. have invented a scientific-sounding phenomenon. Predictably, fans of the movie have applied their considerable powers of exegesis and posted the results on the Web. One such amplification of the text (1) speculates that these entities are akin to the mitochondria in human cells.

Mitochondria, those subcellular structures that are passed from one generation to the next along maternal bloodlines, assist in the conversion of stored nutrients to energy. I learned that on D. R. Caprette's index to mitochondria Web sites (2), last updated June 9, 1997. (Searcher, beware. The definition of mitochondria hasn't changed in two years, but other information may have a much shorter shelf life. The best Web sites tell you when they were last updated.) Needless to say, mitochondria have played an important part in human evolution. This phenomenon is placed into a very large context on Philip Brown's site, the History of the Universe (3).

I was interested in the interaction between science and pseudoscience in the popular media. A quick Metacrawler search (4) produced hundreds of hits on medical and biology sites, as did a search of IBM's patent archive (5). How much overlap exists between the "hard science" from the lab and the "pseudoscience" fueling the public's hopes and fears? The Bad Science Times calls itself the Web's newsletter about science reporting, but a visit to The Bad Science Times home page (6) proved disappointing; this false front of a site was linked to a lot of "Files Not Found" and was last revised in November 1995.

I had better luck with the Junk Science Home Page (7), which is owned by Citizens for the Integrity of Science (8). This site, which appears to be updated daily, offers a serious critical review of items in the news, such as the claims by certain food companies that their products reduce the risk of heart disease. In addition to the news items and ads for a couple of books, there is an extensive list of links to scientific and medical journals (9); science and medical news (10); and names, addresses, and phone numbers for science, environmental, and medical reporters (11).

The Internet Hoax Alert Page (12), sponsored by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is a reliable source of information on chain letters and alleged viruses of the computer variety. In addition to an extensive list of the more commonly circulated virus scares, there is information on how to identify a new hoax warning, how to identify valid warnings, and what to do if you think you have received a hoax message.

For viruses of the biological kind, see the Health Care Reality Check (13), sponsored by the Georgia Council against Health Fraud. This site contains reference material, including Jack Raso's The Expanded Dictionary of Metaphysical Healthcare and an encyclopedia of answers to frequently asked questions. The news archive covers July 1995 to January 1998, but it has not been updated since then. There is a list of literature, links to discussion groups, and information on how to volunteer with the Health Care Reality Check project. This site is linked to the National Council against Health Fraud Web site (14).

Media scares and conspiracy theories are close kin to junk science and hoaxes. An article on Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in a recent issue of Newsweek (15) quoted a disturbing headline from the normally staid Sunday Times (London): "Big Bang Machine Could Destroy Earth". (Newsweek didn't buy that theory and explained why.) A quick visit to the Sunday Times' Web site (16) confirmed that, indeed, this newspaper was playing up the panic side of the story.

Things really got strange when I followed up on the Newsweek article's mention of a purported connection between the RHIC and John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s, plane crash (17). It seems that the RHIC (located in the eastern part of New York's Long Island) was test-fired on the same day as the plane crash, a few miles away. Could the RHIC have opened up a black hole? Maybe a wormhole? Some physicists associated with the project speculated to members of the lay press on the remote possibility that using the RHIC to collide heavy ions could create "strangelets", a new type of matter made of strange quarks, and thus create artificial black holes. The words "remote" and "unlikely" didn't have a chance of competing against "black holes" and "end of the world".

On July 19, 1999, John Marburger, director of Brookhaven National Laboratory, issued a statement in response to the RHIC media scare (18). Marburger stated that the energy released by ion collisions produced in the RHIC is well within the scope of naturally occurring cosmic phenomena that have been going on for billions of years. A more comprehensive report will be published on Brookhaven's Web site (19).

I had no trouble finding junk science - and lots of it - on the Web. On the other hand, it wasn't too hard to locate authoritative rebuttals, explanations, and reference sources, often by using the same search terms that led to the junk science links. Much of this information was written to be understood by nontechnical readers, but many of the high-tech details are available as well.

So, how's a body to know what's legitimate and what's junk in the search process? Often, you can tell whether a site is worth looking at just by checking the URL. If you see .gov or .edu, your chances of locating good general information are much higher than at sites with snide or humorous-sounding names. Ultimately, there is no substitute for clicking on the hypertext links and looking at the actual Web sites. For instance, junkscience.com had a wealth of useful information, in spite of the name.

And before I forget, I'm planning a trip to Long Island soon, and I really should schedule an appointment to get my midichlorian levels checked.

(1) http://www.theforce.net/swtc/empty.html#midichlorians
(2) http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/studies/mitochondria/mitindex.html
(3) http://historyoftheuniverse.com/index.html.
(4) http://www.metacrawler.com
(5) http://www.patents.ibm.com/ibm.html
(6) http://www.i4.net/
(7) http://junkscience.com/
(8) http://www.cfis.org/
(9) http://junkscience.com/ links/journals.htm
(10) http://junkscience.com/links/smnews.htm
(11) http://www.junkscience.com/database/scirpt.htm;
http://www.junkscience.com/database/envrpt.htm;
http://www.junkscience.com/database/medrpt.htm
(12) http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html
(13) http://www.hcrc.org/index.html
(14) http://www.hcrc.org/ncahf/ncahf.html
(15) Rogers, A.; Check, E.; Davenport, J. Newsweek, Aug 16, 1999, pp 56-57.
Online version at http://newsweek.com/nw-srv/issue/07_99b/printed/us/st/sc0107_1.htm
(16) http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/99/07/18/stinwenws02029.html?000999
(17) http://www.clydelewis.com/dis/nexus/nexus.html
(18) http://www.pubaf.bnl.gov/pr/bnlpr071999.html
(19) http://www.bnl.gov.

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