the war on error – part 1

I have been thinking of writing this series for some time. Our former president was very close to the heart of the problem, if he had only dropped the first letter from the name of his famous war.

This will probably offend some good friends but this recent book by Dr. Guy Offit NPR interview here I think is an account of things gone too far. It also shows that given enough time, work published in error can be corrected by reputable journals and honest researchers.

I entered the PhD program in analytical chemistry at a major US university in early 1970. That was the Kent State Semester, for younger folks, probably the last time our country was close to revolution (personal opinion). At that time, noted professors were lamenting the fact that very few of their graduates ever published again after their PhD thesis. They all had good relations with major corporations, so they knew where most of those former students found jobs.

Scientists and artists could hold their heads high though. Intellectual freedom was a real thing, and their exchanges with Eastern Block countries probably started the thaw in the cold war. For someone like me who grew up with Senator McCarthy’s Red Scare and those “duck and cover” drills at school (thanks Lorraine for the reminder) supposedly to deal with nuclear war, you could easily see that people from Communist countries didn’t have horns, forked tongues, nor breathe fire. They were part of the scientific community, often maintaining their professional integrity at great personal risk.

Flash forward to the 1980s — a noted scientist tells me “In Russia I couldn’t publish because of politics, here in USA I can’t publish because of business.”

This gets to a very big error. It started with political campaigns that pushed the idea that the private sector could do everything better (unproved and in my personal observations the opposite was often true). Scientific discoveries could be proprietary information, not to be shared with the community. Understand that there are instances in the history of science when nations at war with each other recognized achievements by awarding prizes to individuals in countries on the other side!

What is this big error? Namely that the natural world is not subservient to politics and economics. Actually it is quite the opposite, as many of us in the mid-Atlantic region were reminded this weekend by a record breaking snow storm. What has traditionally kept scientists honest is that when you try to cheat, you actually cheat yourself — and others are encouraged to try to repeat your published work.

For profit organizations not only feel they “own” discoveries about the natural world (and can suppress publication to the scientific community), they even have gone so far as to patent genomes. Yes, they can patent your very own DNA, think about that the next time you need to have a biopsy.

Much of the pharmaceutical industry’s work (aside from marketing) consists of taking a molecule that mimics a natural substance, or taking a known natural drug, and altering it enough to allow it to be patented, hopefully not to the extent that it totally loses effectiveness nor kills patients outright. If you look at those leaflets that come inside medication boxes, they appear to be loaded with information, but usually leave some very basic questions unanswered. I remember this from college, when you want to cover up that there is an issue or that you just don’t know, you spew every blessed thing you can remember even remotely related — a snow job. (yeah, managed to tie that in with the weather) They aren’t doing things this way just to be evil (sorry Google) but that is the way we citizens have allowed the law and regulatory structure to deteriorate.

The autism and vaccines case may be unusual, there was one report which suggested that the author of the study had financial ties with lawyers involved in litigation against vaccine manufacturers. It was probably media hype that made the difference rather than direct financial gain. Actually, vaccines are the least profitable sector of the pharmaceutical industry, that is why your flu shot was financied by the Federal Government. This is a very good example of why relying on the private sector and the market is not always a good idea.

I encourage you to do an experiment of your own, all you need is to run a blog. Publish a post that mentions a major name brand medication and say something about generics. Count how many comments you get. If you are running your blog responsibly, you will hold comments for moderation (comment spam is a big problem) and require a valid email address be submitted. Then send a message to that email address. Yes, I have done this, and no, there is never a reply no matter how polite you are. The marketers are in the blogosphere.

Recently things have gone further, corporations in the USA now have rights normally accorded only to real live citizens. This means that marketing and media hype can be even louder.

There is hope though. We just have to acknowledge there has been a big error in granting non-human financial inventions the rights of citizens without them being expected to bear the responsibilities of citizens. For instance, making a good faith effort to pay the taxes required to run our country is a good start. Perhaps the CEOs should do some serious jail time (and not in white collar prisons) if a product kills people. I think that would cut down on so called “frivilous litigation” quite a bit as well. A good citizen seeks out the spirit of the laws of the land and abides by that rather than trying to profit from loopholes.