Which expert should I believe?

Abstract

As a reader of this journal you are probably a professional scientist with an interest in communicating the importance of what you do to the world at large. We share that interest, and advertise to journalists the work we publish that we feel most likely to be of general interest, via press releases on the EurekAlert! website. This works very well, and papers in Current Biology are frequently covered in the general media. This is all fine and dandy; good for us, our authors, the science journalists and their readers.... There is an aspect of this process that is, I believe, deadly serious and of the utmost importance. In certain areas of science, public understanding has an influence on behaviour with serious consequences — this is especially true of medical and environmental matters. Take the recent case in the UK, where there was a report suggesting a possible link between the triple MMR vaccine and autism: this received a great deal of publicity and was followed by a reduction in vaccination levels to dangerous levels, exposing the population as a whole to increased risk of infection. The potential link was never accepted as strong evidence by the majority of specialists in the field, some initial supporters have recanted, and the claim has now largely been refuted. But doubts linger among parents, confused by apparent differences among ‘experts’ in the field — the British Medical Journal, for example, has recently reported that uptake of MMR among two-year-olds in the UK fell from around 92% in early 1995 to around 80% in 2003/4 (see the recent story on the BBC news website, with some interesting reactions from the general public: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4539887.stm). Or consider global warming: this is another situation where the behaviour of the population as a whole is crucial, as we all contribute to the global carbon dioxide level. Public belief is of huge importance here, as only when there is clear acceptance of the problem and the need to address it will politicians be persuaded to implement measures that may, in the short-term at least, be perceived by their electorate as providing downward pressure on their standard of living. Again, the public is confused by the impression of ‘mixed messages’ from ‘experts’. There is a common belief that there is serious disagreement about whether global warming is a real phenomenon, and whether it is ‘scientific fact’ that human activity is causing the warming via carbon dioxide production. Witness recent effusions from Michael Creighton in the US, or the botanist and television personality David Bellamy in the UK — both very well known figures, who continue to argue against the view that global warming is a human-induced phenomenon we can and should do something about. In both cases, however, there is a clear and strong scientific consensus: the overwhelming scientific evidence is that the triple MMR vaccine does not cause autism; and the vast majority of climatologists and ecologists are convinced that we are promoting global warming and need to take immediate action by reducing carbon dioxide production worldwide. These things are known within the respective scientific and medical communities, so why the problem in persuading the public? Part of the problem lies in the indiscriminate way the general media talk about ‘experts’. As we all know, a doctorate or professorship is not a guarantee of good sense. Even a Nobel prize can be (particularly) misleading; just consider the controversy over HIV and AIDS, where Kary Mullis, who won a Nobel prize for inventing PCR, weighed in on the side of those who argued — against a huge body of evidence — that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. The media has a great responsibility here — their actions can have huge influence on public behaviour, with potentially great consequences. They need to bear these potential consequences in mind, and to find ways to distinguish among ‘experts’ and convey the distinctions clearly in their communications. All too frequently they are too agnostic about the relative merits of their sources — in the UK at least they even have an alarming predilection for making heroes of ‘mavericks’ and villains of the scientific establishment, parodied as some kind of conservative mafia. This is not only unfounded but dangerous. We shall try to do what we can to counter this unfortunate tendency, and the UK’s Royal Society is making great efforts in this direction (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4553077.stm for example), but the onus of responsibility lies with journalist and their editors in the general media.