Scare campaigns and science reporting.(Science and media)

QUADRANT READERS will remember America's "science wars", spearheaded by the masterful Sokal hoax, a "hodgepodge of unsupported arguments, outright mistakes, and impenentrable jargon" designed to challenge standards of logic, truth and intellectual enquiry in scientific debate. It is a great shame that Australia never had its own overt science wars, because the issues that raged in these wars weigh even more pressingly today in this country. We need a public debate of this kind because our political leaders, the media that reports science, and the public consumers of the products of scientific research are all operating with dated (and in some cases dangerous) assumptions and agendas.

The MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine scare in Britain perhaps best exemplifies one extreme of this. At the heart of the scare was a perfectly legitimate study which identified a link between childhood vaccination and a virus found in the stomachs of autistic children. This finding, when reported, attracted attention disproportionate to its import, finally gathering so much momentum it led to widespread fear that vaccines directly cause autism.

Ultimately, the scare led to public mistrust of all vaccines. Worse, after the original research was misrepresented in the media, it was subsequently also "debunked" in the media--leading to more mistrust in science. As Dr Ben Goldacre, the author of Bad Science, noted:

 
   Now, even though popular belief in the MMR 
   scare is--perhaps--starting to fade, popular 
   understanding of it remains minimal: people 
   periodically come up to me and say, isn't it funny 
   how that Wakefield MMR paper turned out to be 
   bad science after all? And I say: no. The paper 
   always was and still remains a perfectly good 
   small case series report, but it was systematically 
   misrepresented as being more than that, by media 
   that are incapable of interpreting and reporting 
   scientific data. 

In the Australian media, a key problem is that any science innovation is very difficult to unpack in a newspaper dial-a-quote or radio sound bite--and outside a handful of publications, Australia doesn't publish science essays longer than 5000 words. In addition, science literacy among politicians, journalists and the public rarely accords with the sophistication of the scientific data being accessed. What has become unspeakable is that journalists and their publics, like small children reaching for the medicine cabinet, do not always understand what is best.

Here is an Australian case in point. Some criticism has been directed to what is seen as Prime Minister Rudd's shameless populist tactic of inviting "ordinary" Australians to the Labor government's 2020 Ideas Summit. Even before Mr Rudd was elected, the then Opposition Leader displayed a populist answer to the fraught issue of genetic modification (GM) of crop plants:

 
   Labor recognises ongoing community concern 
   about genetically modified crops being grown in 
   Australia ... A Rudd Labor government will ensure 
   that the assessment process for GM licence 
   application is based on rigorous science, and that 
   any evidence presented to support claims is subject 
   to peer review and thorough public consultation ... 
   standards must be met to the satisfaction of the 
   scientific community [and] the consumer 
   community. [italics added]