Chapter One
Too Wonderful to be True
Nothing is too wonderful to be true,
if
it be consistent with the laws of nature
Michael Faraday
On the night of 26 April 1803 the people of the rural French village of
L'Aigle were turned out of their beds by the thunderous noise of more than two
thousand rocks falling from the sky. This phenomenal shower of meteorites also
woke up the members of the Academie des Sciences. They appointed a commission to
investigate the incident and, when its report was published, the French
scientists were compelled to admit that stones really could fall from the sky.
Throughout the previous century, the enlightenment of the scientific age had
dispelled one after another the mediaeval illusions and old wives' tales
fostered by generations of country people and town dweller alike. In the cold
light of modern Post-Newtonian science, the idea that stones could fall out of
the sky as thunderbolts was denounced as an unscientific absurdity by the
Academie, Europe's leading rational authority. Antoine Lavoisier, father of
modern chemistry, told his fellow Academicians, 'Stones cannot fall from the
sky, because there are no stones in the sky!'
Museums all over Europe threw out their cherished meteorite specimens with
the rubbish as shameful relics of a superstitious past. Today scarcely a single
specimen is known that predates 1790 except for the 280-pound stone that fell in
Alsace in 1492, that is kept in the town hall of Ensisheim, and that proved too
heavy for even the Academie to dislodge.
Despite this final acceptance by French scientists following the L'Aigle
shower, acceptance elsewhere was slow and reluctant. The American
President, Thomas Jefferson (who had studied natural sciences),
refused to believe in the extraterrestrial origin of a meteorite that fell in
Weston, Connecticut, as late as 1807.
One of the first professional scientists to take meteorites seriously
was German chemist and metallurgist Karl Reichenbach.
Reichenbach made quite a name for himself in Germany's embryonic chemical
industry. He was the first chemist to isolate important materials by distilling
coal tar, the method by which he discovered creosote and paraffin, the principal
lighting oil of the nineteenth century. He also studied the metallurgy of
meteorites.
Having broken new ground in several areas of chemistry and having
demonstrated
the value of empirical research in dispelling superstition (even
scientifically-approved superstition) Reichenbach struck out in 1844 into the
territory that was to prove his undoing. He was introduced by a doctor in Vienna
to a sick young woman who appeared to be able to perceive the field surrounding
a magnet. He carried out a number of blind experiments with her to test this
ability and confirmed that it appeared to be real. He published his findings in
1845 -- his book becoming a sensation throughout European society.
European science, on the other hand, took a distinctly dim view of this
research. Stones from the sky was quite enough originality for one man: a girl
who could see magnetic fields was going too far. Reichenbach retreated back to
more orthodox research in physical chemistry and disappeared into obscurity.
Today his name is scarcely to be found in any reference book or encyclopaedia.
You can read as much as you wish about the inventor of the frozen pea or the
discoverer of purple dye, but you will not find a word about the scientist who
discovered paraffin.
Karl Reichenbach represents all that is splendid about scientific endeavour
and the courageous investigation of the new and the unknown. At the same time he
symbolises the extraordinary nature of the resistance that we all feel to the
new. It was science that proved the reality of meteorites; yet it was science
that had for a generation dismissed them as fanciful. How can the same
principles, the same methods -- even the same people -- reach diametrically
opposed conclusions?
When the nineteenth century's greatest experimental physicist Michael
Faraday, announced that he had found a new source of energy simply by moving a
magnet in a coil of wire, many educated people found the claim impossible to
believe and looked on the young man as a charlatan. Faraday responded with
perhaps the most memorable words ever uttered by a scientist; 'Nothing is too
wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.'
Only twenty years after Faraday made the breakthrough in electromagnetism
that made the modern world possible, the Fox sisters of New York began to hear
rapping at their table from 'departed spirits' -- the first modern recorded
instance of paranormal phenomena. Faraday left his researches and spent
substantial time and energy attempting (without success) to prove the Fox
sisters fraudulent. Even someone who professed to believe that nothing is too
wonderful to be true found table-turning an intolerable affront to reason.
It seems that when it comes to investigating natural phenomena there is a
line beyond which some scientists, for some reason, are unwilling to cross.
Equally, it seems that there are some individuals, including very distinguished
scientists, who are willing to risk the censure and ridicule of their colleagues
by stepping over that mark. This book is about those scientists who have stepped
over the mark. But, more importantly, it is about the curious social and
intellectual forces that seek to prohibit such research. About those areas of
scientific research that are Taboo subjects: subjects whose discussion is
forbidden under pain of ridicule and ostracism.
It is also about what I believe to be a worrying but well-documented social
trend; a trend towards a normalised world view based on a singular model that is
derived entirely from the reductionist western scientific viewpoint, and the
marginalisation and suppression of any form of scientific dissent or alternative
world view.
From the examples given earlier you might imagine that I am speaking
historically and that, while the ill-informed people of previous centuries fell
into the error of rejecting major discoveries from the worlds of electricity and
astronomy, no scientist today would react in such an intemperate, unreflecting
way about a matter that must be purely a question of fact.
Actually, Faraday and Reichenbach would almost certainly have experienced
more difficulty not less in making their voices heard in today's climate of
intolerance.
In March 1989 Professor Martin Fleischmann of Southampton University and
Professor Stanley Pons of the University of Utah put a new phrase into the
scientific lexicon when they jointly announced the discovery of 'cold fusion' --
the production of usable amounts of energy by what seemed to be a nuclear
process occurring in a jar of water at room temperature.
The reaction to the announcement was almost universally hostile. The two were
ridiculed by both the popular press and scientific press especially Nature
magazine. Major institutions who had already spent several billion dollars in
pursuit of 'hot' fusion -- notably Harwell and MIT -- announced that Fleischmann
and Pons' results could not be reproduced. When it was discovered that MIT had
fudged their results in order to discredit cold fusion (as described in Chapter
Three) they merely amended their conclusion from 'failure to reproduce' to 'too
insensitive to confirm'. But by that time the damage had been done. No more significant research money was to be granted
for cold fusion research and the United States patent office still relies on the
MIT findings to reject all patent applications involving cold fusion.
This official position remains despite the fact that at the time of writing
(March 1993) cold fusion reactions have been reproduced
by ninety two major universities and commercial corporations in ten countries
around the world including Stanford Research Institute, Los Alamos National
Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Naval Research Laboratory, Naval
Weapons Centre at China Lake, Naval Ocean Systems Centre, Texas A & M
University, California Polytechnic Institute, and Japan's Hokkaido and Osaka
Universities.
In many ways cold fusion is the perfect paradigm of scientific Taboo in
action. The high priests of hot fusion were quick to ostracise and ridicule
those who they saw as profaning the sacred wisdom. And empirical fact counted
for nothing in the face of their concerted derision.
Even more disturbing are cases from the world of
medical research where respected
journals like the Lancet and British Medical Journal
have published scores of studies reporting evidence for the effectiveness of
holistic methods of prevention and treatment of cancer, heart disease and other
illnesses; studies that have largely been ignored by those funding the fight
against such diseases, because they seem to dabble in another Taboo area: the
idea of a causal link between mind and body.
Often those who cry Taboo do so from the best of motives; a desire to ensure
that our hard-won scientific enlightenment is not corrupted by the credulous
acceptance of crank ideas and that the community does not slide back into what
Sir Karl Popper graphically called the 'tyranny of opinion'. Yet in setting out
to guard the frontiers of knowledge, some scientific purists are adopting a
brand of skepticism that is indistinguishable from the tyranny they seek to
resist. These modern 'skeptics' are sometimes the most unreflecting of
individuals and their motivations are anything but scientific yet they appoint
themselves guardians of the spirit of truth just the same.
The nature of these guardians and their activities is examined in Chapter
Ten.
Equally, of course, those who rightly value the importance of knowledge are
concerned at the damage that crank beliefs can do to any community and are right
to take action to call those with revolutionary ideas to account, using the
principles of the scientific method and its rigorous demand for empirical
evidence.
And this raises the important question of just how we can tell a real crank
from a real innovator -- a Faraday from a false prophet -- an issue that is
explored in Chapter Eleven.
The cases of scientific Taboo referred to earlier -- and many others
described in later chapters -- raise a number of important questions of general
public interest. Who do you have to be to have a voice about scientific research
on which large sums of public money are spent? Who decides who you have to be?
In what forum, or by what mechanism, can the voices of dissent ever be heard in
science in Britain today?
In past centuries these questions were less vital because the arguments were
about whether the Earth was round or flat -- interesting but not
life-threatening. Now the arguments are about whether HIV causes AIDS, whether
we are heading for a global warming catastrophe or not, and whether disease can
be treated holistically. Even a question such as whether cold fusion is real or
illusory has a hard political edge and hefty financial implications for the
taxpayers who foot the research bill.
This year Britain will spend more than L5,000 million of public money on
scientific research, almost two per cent of the nation's overall budget, more
than twice what will be spent on Wales and equivalent to the amount spent on
Scotland.
These billions will be spent on a huge variety of projects, some in pure
science whose aim is simply the advancement of knowledge and whose ultimate
benefits it is impossible to predict. But much of this money will be spent on
research aimed at relatively short term benefits to the community here and now,
such as medical research. In the past 20 years Britain has spent £2,000 million
on medical research (at current prices). Yet in that 20 years, and regardless of
such expenditure, there has been no change in life expectancy despite often
repeated claims to the contrary. Even more disturbing, in the same period there
has been no significant reduction in deaths due to the most common forms of
cancer or heart disease. Indeed, studies in Britain and the United States show
that deaths through cancer have increased over the past thirty years (as
described in Chapter Seven) again counter to claims that medical research is
improving treatment.
Later chapters tell how, in part, the failures of medical science can be
attributed to an unwillingness to consider and act on the mountains of evidence
showing that a substantial part of our research effort could more profitably be
redirected to prevention rather than cure, and that holistic methods of
treatment are effective but have been ruled as Taboo subjects by many medical
researchers.
Of course, not all members of the scientific establishment are deaf to new
discoveries -- far from it. Many scientists are themselves in the forefront of
the struggle to topple the barricades that some of their colleagues have
erected. But in some ways big science, institutional science, is gaining many of
the trappings of a banana republic dictatorship: a revenue of billions that is
unaccounted for and an administration that is unaccountable to tax payers,
except in a cosmetic way; the making and unmaking of reputations by a tame
scientific press; the scientific police who make sure members of the profession
are thinking along politically correct lines, and who patrol the content of
scientific publications.
Press and broadcasters have been pursuing the Royal family relentlessly of
late asking whether we the community are receiving value for money for the £10
million or so we pay each year for the privy purse. It seems to me that there is
a far more important question going entirely unasked: are we the community
receiving value for money for the £5,000 million of public money spent each
year on scientific research?
The truly disturbing thing about this question is that, at present, anyone
who is not a professional scientist (and precious few who are) simply has no way
to answer it. And unless and until we have some mechanism by which the community
can call institutional scientists to account, not just administratively, but in
terms of the value of their research, it will remain impossible for us to know
whether our money is being spent wisely or foolishly.
At present the only mechanism that exists for oversight of scientific
research and the allocation of huge sums of public money to pay for such
research is the system of peer-review, under which papers reporting results and
proposing future research are reviewed by their authors' scientific colleagues
before being accepted for publication and the allocation of further resources.
The system has come about because, on the face of it, it makes sense as the most
efficient method.
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The peer-review consensus seemed appropriate to a gentleman's profession.
After all, surely only a nuclear physicist is suitably qualified to decide
whether public money should be spent on researching cold fusion? Only a cancer
specialist should decide whether medical research funds should be spent on
holistic treatment? Isn't it appropriate that scientists should regulate science
in the same way that lawyers oversee the legal profession, and journalists
supervise the press? The events described in detail later show that however
precise their calculations may be in the laboratory, scientists' arithmetic is
no better than anyone else's when it comes to holding the purse strings. And
while it can be argued that lawyers and journalists are no better at regulating
themselves they, unlike scientists, are not responsible for spending thousands
of millions of pounds of public money each year -- they spend their own money,
not ours. Indeed, looking at the evidence presented later, some would say that
handing the purse strings of research to the scientists who are going to spend
that cash is no more reliable than
recruiting the urchins who press their noses against the windows to look after
the sweet shop.
We live in a society that prizes liberty of conscience and freedom of speech.
Plurality of viewpoint is now so highly valued it has even been enshrined in the
legislation governing British television broadcasting, the act of 1990 obliging
broadcasters to provide a 'broad range and diversity of independent
productions.' It is an article of faith in every department
of public life that diversity of opinion, tolerance and a robustess are
the vital signs of our society's health. That no subject for debate should be
forbidden and that no person or group should have the authority to deny such
discussion.
Yet one great Taboo area remains; one area of public life that
may
be spoken of only by its high priests and whose inner sanctum the rest of us may
not approach; the area of institutionalised science -- big science. Not science
in the textbook sense of How many litres does it take to fill the bath. Not even
science in the sense of My theory's better than your theory. But science in the
sense of Can we have another billion pounds of public money to spend on our
research this year? And science in the sense of Don't bother your pretty little
heads; we'll do the thinking for you.
This book examines some of the most important cases of scientific discoveries
being treated as Taboo subjects; of the cost of this ideological correctness to
the community and -- most ambitious of all -- attempts to identify the causes of
this behaviour by both scientists and non-scientists. It is an attempt by one
outsider to pay a profane visit to that inner sanctum on behalf of the millions
who will never get a chance to see for themselves what they are paying for.
I want to begin my examination by looking in detail at some well documented
cases of the Taboo reaction in science and their effects on the community. But
first, let's take a quick tour of the subject by looking briefly at some classic
cases of scientific Taboo in action.
