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Transcript from a portion of the conference, Communicating the Future: Best Practices for Communication of Science to the Public, March 7-8, 2002. Special note: The transcript below was created from a videotape of a talk given by Joseph Schwarcz at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada in 2002. Due to technical difficulties, Schwarcz's talk to the Best Practices meetings was not recorded. The text below is nearly identical to the talk given at the Best Practices meeting so we offer it as the best subsitute we can provide. Thanks to Carleton University for their assistance. Keynote
Address: Sense, Nonsense, and Science Schwarcz: There were five friends who lived in Quebec and one day they decided to go on a trip to visit a foreign country, so they piled into a bus and headed for Ontario. They got across the border and they were looking out the window and one of them who happened to be a naturopath upon spying one black sheep on a hill, he said, "Look, All of the sheep in Ontario are black." Next to him was a chiropractor-a somewhat more critical thinker. He said, "I don't think you can really say that. All you can say is that in Ontario some of the sheep are black." Well sitting behind them was a biologist. More scientifically minded. He said, "I don't think you guys can really say that scientifically either. All you can really say is that in Ontario, there is at least one black sheep. " But sitting next to him was a physicist. He said, "Well, that isn't exactly right either. If you just want to go in terms of conclusions based upon the evidence. In Ontario, there is at least one sheep that is black on one side." [laughter] Sitting behind them, of course, was the chemist. The fount of all knowledge. He said, "No all of you guys are wrong. You can't really say that. The only thing you can really say is that in Ontario there is at least one sheep that is black on one side, some of the time." Well the point of that little story is the importance of coming to conclusions based upon observations. And that is really what science is all about. But unfortunately there are far too many people who don't really understand what that means and often jump to all kinds of wrong conclusions even though the evidence is staring them in the face. And what I want to do with you here today is talk to you and share with you some of my adventures in dealing with the public and show you how much confusion there is and what may be some of the ways of righting it. Well, where do we start. Oh. a couple of years ago on Dec. 23, and I remember this very well because I was at home during the Christmas holidays. A friend of mine called me up and said, "You've got to turn on Dini Petty." Well, I didn't know who Dini Petty was or how I was supposed to turn her on a 9 o'clock in the morning. [laughter] Well, she was the hostess of a TV show. There she was locked in conversation with a guest. And obviously they were talking about my kind of things because they had all kinds of foods on the table. And they were avidly engaged in label reading. Just as I turned it on I was hit over the head by these immortal words. " If you can't pronounce the words, it's a chemical and I don't know how many people want to be eating chemicals." As you can imagine, I immediately perked up upon hearing this. I was astounded to discover that the author of these words was a physician, who had labeled herself a nutritional consultant who was pontificating about the evils of chemicals. "When you talk about chemicals even moderate use is too much." If you can imagine this was pretty unnerving for someone who has spent a life in chemistry. And I had to do something about it. But what do you do? You instantly feel this anger when nonsense is being perpetrated. I decided I would call up the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons. Because the show came from Toronto, I figured they must have some way of regulating medical care. She was a doctor uttering nonsense. Something had to be done. I couldn't get through. The phone was busy. Later I discovered why. The sugar association was calling because she had called sugar, "the great white devil." and they didn't like that. Eventually, I did get through, I made my complaint. Of course they couldn't do much about it. She really was a legitimate M.D. He was actually very receptive and informed me that they cannot guarantee what graduates will say once they leave the university. In any case after this, I carried on a rather vigorous correspondence with this physician in which I criticized some of the things that she said. In fact I decided to target her. I would send her scientific articles about food additives and about safety procedures and regulations, etc. and she would send me back her views on homeopathy. Because she had gravitated towards that. She had come to believe that non-existent molecules could cure people. So as you can imagine we did carry on a rather vigorous correspondence. Until two years ago when one of my letters came back unopened. And it turned out that she had left Canada. She had gone to the U.S. to New York. Obviously pastures are greener there for her particular brand of silliness. I would like to take credit for driving her out of the country, but I don't think that really happened. Eventually I had the chance of getting on the Dini Petty show myself to try to correct all this. But I don't think I had a real effect because she really wasn't interested in hearing about the safety of food additives. It was much more sensational to talk about all of the horrors and to paint chemical as devils. So that often is very difficult to fight. But I've been trying to do that for a long time. Often people ask me how I got into this very bizarre game of communicating science to the public. It actually all started a very long time ago in a most unusual place. It started at St. Joseph's Oratory, which is a large cathedral that dominates Montreal's skyline. And when I was in grade 6 I went up there with a friend of mine to put silver nitrate into the holy water. For those of you who are not chemically adept let me explain the beauty of this. The holy water is usually stored at a little container at the entrance to the church. Pilgrims come and dip their fingers into the holy water and then cross themselves on the forehead and then go into the church to pray. Well, silver nitrate is a light sensitive chemical. So they would to into the church to pray and when they would come out, the sun would expose their forehead and change the silver nitrate into metallic silver and they would develop these indelible black crosses on their foreheads and they would be convinced that they had seen a miracle. And we who were hiding in the bushes knew that indeed they had seen a miracle, it was a chemical miracle. It was then that I decided that I would like to grown up so that I too could teach people how to put silver nitrate into holy water and do these marvelous things. But along the way I found out that there was a lot more to do with chemistry than just that. And that the real magic of chemistry lay not in making indelible crosses on people's foreheads, but it lay in understanding the way our world works. The medications, the foods that we eat, the cosmetics that we use, the cleaning agents that we all use—these are all chemicals. And they are all fascinating. Of course, they require a little bit of understanding. So that's where it all started. But the real public interaction began in 1980. It was stimulated by this whole silver nitrate business. Because I had been doing various demonstrations, such as putting silver nitrate on the hand to show how the color developed. And I sort of began to be known for these things. And then in 1980, a critical event occurred at the descendent of Expo 67, which was known as Man and His World, which was a ongoing summer World's Fair. It had a pavilion. The pavilion was the UNESCO pavilion. They wanted to mount some kind of a science fair display, sort of a mini science museum. And they asked me and a couple of my colleagues to do this and we said sure. We hired some students and we set up demonstrations and we did little performances on colors, on plastics, on fireworks. It was kind of neat. It was pretty small scale. People would gather around and sit on little stands and watch these mini shows as we called them. We thought that we were doing a good thing, making headway in terms of popularizing science and the scientific method of thinking. Then one Monday morning which I remember very well. I picked up my morning newspaper. And the page three city column had something about chemistry. Of course, I started reading it. Very quickly I discovered that it was all about us and our efforts at the pavilion, with which the columnist was taking issue. And he said, while the whole world is worried about a substance called urea formaldehyde used as an insulating material, there are these people at the Expo site telling everyone what a wonderful product it is. Well, this really annoyed me, because what we were demonstrating was polyurethane, a completely different chemical. Now, to make polyurethane, you mix together two substances and you get a nice foaming effect. Very interesting material. Good demonstration. But indeed, this was the time when people were worried about urea formaldehyde. But that's not what we were demonstrating. We were demonstrating this. Polyurethane is a foam. It is a very interesting material. However, this column was about urea formaldehyde, which in those days was being used as an insulating material. In the 1970s we went through the energy crisis, everyone was insulating. And there were a lot of fly-by-night operators who would apply urea formaldehyde foam insulation improperly. It would release formaldehyde, which of course can be toxic. So there was legitimate concern over this. There were legal hassles all over the place. So the columnist was saying, while everyone is concerned about this, these guys are showing what a wonderful product it is. Well, by 9 o'clock that morning I had a letter on his desk, together with a large polyurethane egg, about this size that I had made that he was to hang around his neck for penance for having laid such a large scientific egg—not having recognized the difference between polyurethane and urea formaldehyde, the only common feature was that these were both foams. They were chemically completely different. This is like saying concentrated sulfuric acid is the same as water, because they look the same and they're both liquids. Of course, this was nonsense. He wrote a very nice retraction the next day, saying that he really was at fault. And the problem was his lack of scientific education. That he didn't know that there was more than one kind of foam and that he had learned something and he wished he that hadn't skipped all those chemistry classes in high school. Two days later I got a call from a Montreal radio station. CJAD it happened to be, asking me if I would like to comment on this controversy. Which, of course, was a non-controversy. It was a non-issue. I said "sure." I explained it very much like I've explained it to you. And I talked about the importance of understanding science so that you don't come to these wrong conclusions based upon the evidence. And I guess they must have liked the explanation because a couple of weeks later there was some other scientific question that came up, I don't remember what it was. And they called me to ask if I could explain it, which I did. And pretty soon they asked would you like to come on the air to do this regularly and answer questions? I said OK, I would give it a shot. And I've been doing it for quite some time as you can see. About 20 years. Twenty-two years actually. And it has been a fascinating experience. I remember the very first day. In particular, one question. I was a little bit nervous then because I didn't know what to expect. Perhaps I wasn't listening all that carefully. When one of the questioners seemed to me to be asking "Is it safe to lick your balls?" [laughter] Now, I was astounded by that for a moment until the conversation went on and I realized that the caller was asking about golf balls. Because in those days there was a controversy about the pesticides that were being sprayed on lawns, especially on golf greens. And apparently it is the practice of some golfers, to lick their fingers and then wipe off the ball to make sure that it's clean. And some were concerned they may therefore transfer some of these pesticides to their body. And when you hear that part of the story, it begins to be reasonable. So we did address it and talk about it. It just shows that you really have to pay attention to what people are asking. I've now been doing this for a very long time. The questions, of course, change but they are equally interesting. Not long ago a lady calls up and wanted to know what was the safest way to burn a laminated picture. Why? And it quickly became apparent that she had recently been divorced. She did not want any mementos of her husband. She wanted to burn the laminated picture. But she had remembered that this lamination is done on particleboard, which is glued together with urea formaldehyde. And she was worried that she would release formaldehyde, which is toxic. And she didn't want to give him the satisfaction of harming her after the divorce. So we talked about this and actually came to the conclusion that this is not a totally unrealistic concern. If you do burn particleboard inside a house and you don't have very good ventilation, you could be exposed to formaldehyde. And if someone is particularly sensitive to it could have some consequences. So this is the kind of interesting questions that one gets and one has to learn to deal with. Finally, two years ago all of these sorts of attempts at communicating science to the public and adventures culminated in the establishment at McGill of the Office of Science and Society, which is a unique enterprise, certainly in Canada, probably in North America. Where the university has said that its role does not stop at the gates of the university and its responsibility does not end once students have graduated. That there is a social factor here, a social responsibility, to make sure that the public is educated because after all the university lives on public funding. Our mandate is to make sure that good unbiased scientific information gets disseminated. We answer questions via email, or Web site or by telephone. The office was actually opened in September 1999 by Principal Shapiro. We have a physical place. We have a location. I have a staff. We deal with all these kind of things. We had a Web site. Of course, these days you're nobody unless you have a Web site and there it is: www.mcgill.ca/chempublic. We put out position papers. We answer questions on the Web site as well. And something else that we have started last year we put our courses that we teach, under the umbrella name of World of Chemistry, we have four separate courses which essentially deal with the science of everyday life. And those are accessible. They are accessible to everybody through http://cool.mcgill.ca/ and you can take a look at these if you are interested. There is no password. There is no charge of any kind. You just look it up and you click on the lecture that you are interested in and you get the whole visual presentation just like you see here. You hear the voice just as it has been recorded. The only thing that you don't see is the lecture but that of course is irrelevant. So you may want to check that out. We have a lot of interesting stuff on there. Public outreach I think is very needed, because there is such widespread misunderstanding of science and the role of science in our lives. I mean what can you say when you pick up ads like this from circulars. I got this in the mail and it is an ad for underwear. Now I don't mean to demean this underwear, it may be very good underwear. It suggests that it is a fabric that breathes, that allows moisture to pass through. Maybe so. But look at the claims. "H2O also known as sweat [laughter] is attracted to [our long johns] like ants to a picnic. Our constant comfort process separates the H2 from the O making evaporation take place much faster." [laughter] Now let's just analyze this for a moment. I mean obviously the graphic artist that they hired to do this has never had a course in chemistry. H20 molecules do not look like that. There is no bond between the two hydrogens. Furthermore the implication that evaporation involves the separation of the oxygen from the hydrogen is absurd. Evaporation is nothing more than a change of state. If indeed if it were possible to break down H2O in H2 and O purely by using underwear appropriately [laughter] we would have a solution to our energy crisis. Because hydrogen is an extremely effective fuel. It burns very clean. It would be great if we could just rub our underwear and generate it, but alas we cannot do that. What can one say when we have surveys that tell us that 30% of Europeans believe that only genetically modified tomatoes contain genes. I don't have the figures for North America. The survey has never been done. I think it would be frightening to find the results. I'm not sure what they believe about genetic modification. They think that it does horrific things. And it is my belief that the benefits of genetic modification outweigh the risks and sometimes when I make statements like that people will come up to me and say, "Oh yes, today you guys, you scientists, perhaps you just want to take a gene from a bacterium and put it into a tomato or into a canola plant, That's today. Tomorrow you'll want to be cloning people. [laughter]. Well, no it doesn't work like that. Just because we can put a gene into corn that makes it ward off the corn borer, doesn't mean that we want to be cloning people. Most scientists are responsible and want to work for the public good. Now it is of course to be understood that people have critical analyses of these things and worry about the safety because most people, of course, do not understand what is going on. You tell someone that you are genetically modifying their food. They perceive that you are tinkering with nature, that you are playing around with DNA. They don't really know what DNA is but they know it should not be played around with. And they are very suspicious of genetically modified organisms and of course they become all worried when they believed that they are consuming genetically modified foods. Well, I think that a lot of this worry comes from improper education. I think before genetic modification was unleashed upon the public, there should have been a better campaign of education. So people would have begun to understand what it is. That we mix genes all the time. We do this on a daily basis. The usual product is children. And they don't all come out the way we want them. Right? So you can never guarantee that mixing genes is going to be safe in all ways. But we think that it is a good idea to create children because the possible benefits outweigh the risks. So it is as well with genetic modification. The allegations about this being Frankenstein's harvest and the horrific things that genetic modification does, such as Greenpeace which disseminates this kind of propaganda to children. Which by the way is wrong. Frosted Flakes are not made from corn that is genetically modified. Corn that is sold for eating purposes is not genetically modified. But they use this as a weapon of terror to scare people away from scientific advances. Now I think any scientist cannot give guarantees to the public about anything. We don't know what may happen. But what we have to look at is whether or not in our sphere of knowledge right now, the benefits outweigh the risks. I cannot prove to anyone that there is going to be no harm from genetic modification ever. Because you can't possibly take into account everything that can happen. And science can never prove a negative. That is a naïve expectation that members of the public have. Let me give you an illustration of that. You know every Christmastime we have evidence that reindeer can fly. You see it on TV programs, you see it in movies, you see it on cards. Well is it possible? I don't' think so, but could I prove it. Well, I could take a reindeer and take him up to the top of the Peace Tower and nudge him off. Let's face it if that reindeer ever in his life were motivated to fly that's the moment. What would happen. I suspect we would have a mess at the bottom. I could repeat it with another reindeer and another. What will I have proven? Only that those reindeer on that given day, could not or did not choose to fly. I cannot prove that reindeer cannot fly—that there are not eight reindeer somewhere in the world, given the right conditions, the right stimulation that they cannot fly. Similarly we can never say that there will be no problem with genetic modifications. So far the problems that have cropped up have not been significant. The benefits outweigh the risks. The benefits may take some time to be manifested that is true, because the stage we are at with genetic modification I think it is the stage of the Wright Brothers first flight. I think if you were present there, you would not have been very impressed. Because you would have seen this primitive contraption kind of bounce around for maybe 100 meters. Not very effective. But anyone there with some imagination would have realized that okay today it flies 100 meters, tomorrow its probably going to be 200, and by next year a mile and within five years from city to city. That's where we stand. The principle is demonstrated. I think that we are going to see the benefits in the long run. So I'm not an enemy of Tony the Tiger of Frosted Flakes. I think that exploring genetic modification is a good thing. I think the riskiest thing in life is not taking any risks at all, because then you never get anywhere and there are going to be all kinds of benefits. Indeed we know that there are 2 billion people probably in the world who suffer from iron deficiency anemia because they subsist on rice which has very low iron content. It is possible to genetically modify it to increase the iron content. We know that there are about 250 million people with significant visual impairments developed every year because of a lack of Vitamin A. That's because they subsist on rice which has very little beta carotene, which is the body's precursor to vitamin A. Golden rice can be engineered to have more beta carotene. It is not going to happen tomorrow, or next week, or in two weeks, but the principle has been demonstrated. Not only that I think we will be able to engineer things like broccoli to have more sulphoraphane which is an anti-cancer compound. I think we'll be able to engineer crops to grow in soil that is very salty, which is a big problem around the world. So we have to have an open mind and realize that there are no guarantees but that the benefits are going to be very real. These are the kind of issues that we have to deal with all the time. But there are others too which are simpler and perhaps more curious, very often food related because everyone is interested in food. I had a lady who called me up and said, "I have a carrot problem." So what's your problem? "I slice up my carrots, I put them on a plate and but them in the microwave oven to cook them." Well, I didn't say anything about this particular technique of cooking carrots. But OK. So what's the problem? "They explode." Well, of course, this gets my attention. Over the years I have learned that you don't dismiss anything out of hand. You know that's one of the worst things that you can do in science. You always investigate. So I say tell me exactly what you did and what you saw. "Well, I put the carrots on the plate exactly as I am showing you here" and exactly as you will do when you go home tonight. [laughter] And she says I put them in the microwave and they exploded. So I said describe the explosion. "Flames. Fire." So I say OK and I've got to try this. So I go home and set it up just like that. Turn on the power. Sure enough, maybe not exactly an explosion, but wisps of flames, really interesting. What's going on? Well, it turns out that the microwave set up mini electric currents inside the pieces of carrots. Sometimes a spark will jump the gap between the two carrots—as you can see where the carrots have become charred. But the carrot oils, of course, are also volatilized by the heat. And the carrot oils are highly flammable. So the spark will set these oils on fire and you get these little whiffs of flame. It's really interesting, you'll enjoy it. [laughter] Let me tell you that carrots are not the best. Green pepper is very good and orange peel is outstanding. [laughter] You may have to play around with the distance, but it will happen. Now I talked about this on the radio one day. I described it very much as I have described it to you here today and it turned out to have an interesting consequence. Because I had a call from the manufacturer of Mrs. White's pickles. Now you probably have not heard of this brand pickle, but it is an outstanding brand and if you ever go to Montreal make sure that you pick up Mrs. White's dill pickles. But they had had a complaint from a customer who told them that while she was heating up her dill pickle in the microwave oven—and there are some issues that we just will not explore [laughter]. She complained that they started to spark. Now the only time, that she had ever seen sparking in the microwave oven, of course, was when she had put some metal in there. So she was convinced that the pickles were contaminated by bits of metal and she was threatening to sue. Well one of the Mrs. White's pickle people had heard my explanation on the radio and wondered if this carrot effect would also apply to pickles. So of course I did the pickle experiment and it turns out that it does apply. Pickles can also spark in the microwave oven. And as soon as we established that they were able to allay the fears of this lady and I now have a lifetime supply of Mrs. White's pickles. [laughter] And another interesting mystery has been solved. But there are some that are even more interesting than that. Believe it or not I have had to answer questions like this. How do you open a cremation urn that has been epoxied shut? Why? Well. It turned out that they read the will a little bit too late. And the urn already had been glued shut, when they discovered that the victim wanted to have her ashes strewn over an area of the forest or something. So they couldn't get the urn open. So we had to do some experiments. So eventually it turned out that acrylonitrile was the right solvent. So if you ever have to confront this problem, you'll know that it is acrylonitrile that can open the epoxy glue on the urn. One day I had to make a house call on a Barbie doll. Why? Barbie doll collecting is a whole world. They have conventions, they trade them, they sell them, it's absolutely fascinating. I went to one of these conventions with 5,000 Barbie doll collectors there. And they have hundreds of booths where they sell the accoutrements. They sell Barbie houses, they sell Barbie dolls. There are women dressed up like Barbie. It is absolutely fascinating. And some of the oldest Barbie dolls, of course, have huge value. Well, this lady calls me up in panic, saying that she has purchased a $5,000 Barbie doll and it wasn't perfect. Because there was little bit of her lip that had a dent in it where the paint had come off. And she had tried to fix it. And she had tried to fix it by taking a felt tip marker, a red one, to fill in the spot. She didn't reckon the fact that the ink would run. And it ran into the doll. So she wanted to know what she could do. So I had to make a house call. I went with my solvents and my Q-tips and I investigated. Now when I first saw this doll, it really was tragic. It was too horrible for me to show you what she really looked like after what was done. [laughter] It was so terrible that even Ken was horrified. [laughter] So I tried all my solvents but this time I could not solve the problem because the dye had permeated the plastic. The plastic was very porous to this particular dye. Eventually with a little bit of peroxide, we were able to lighten the color but that was it. And the doll obviously lost a great deal of its value and she was pretty devastated by this. But there is a moral here. And that is if you buy a $5,000 Barbie doll do not attempt to repair it with a 29 cent felt tip pen without testing whether or not it will run. What eventually happened to the particular Barbie doll I don't know, but if this lady were a regular reader of the tabloids, she may have used it for a different purpose because it turns out that Barbie dolls, at least according to this gentleman, are very good at bass luring. I don't know, I've never seen any scientific tests to attest to that. A lot of the questions that we get asked in my office are by frightened people who are worried about toxins in their lives. Worried about keeping their health. All understandable, but very often confused. They think that there are simple answers to complex problems. I will give you some examples. You know that one of the real worries these days is cholesterol. Cholesterol has virtually become a 4-letter word. Even those people who have no understanding of what cholesterol is want to eliminate it from their life. So you can understand why it was some few years ago when some scientific research showed that oat bran can reduce cholesterol, that this caught the public's imagination. Everyone wants to lower blood cholesterol because it is associated with heart disease. So stores were stripped bare of oat products. It was a quite an interesting period. Now before that oat products and oat bran particularly were very cheap. This is the outer covering of the oat and it was used only as animal food. So all of a sudden when it was discovered that oat bran could lower cholesterol, it was taken out of the mouths of horses and it was put on our breakfast plates. So what did that leave for the horses well you guessed it. They were eating our foods, we were eating their food. It didn't matter what it was. It could have been dirty potato chips, if it said it contained oat bran, we wanted it. People thought that all of their dietary sins would be forgiven if only somehow they could get oat bran into their diets. It was a very interesting period. It became a fantastically popular product—oats. Now up to that time it hadn't been that popular, except in Scotland, where Dr. Samuel Johnson, one of the authors of an English dictionary told of how the Scots live on food which in England is given to horses. That was a definition used in a dictionary and as you can imagine it upset the Scots. The Scots, of course, had always been great proponents of oats. We know that porridge and haggis are made of oats. There is also a concoction that some of you may have heard of called athole brose which is an alcoholic beverage made from oats. So the Scots were very familiar with these and they were really disturbed when Johnson said that this was only horse food and they had revenge. He was invited to give a public lecture in Scotland after which he was treated to some dinner, for which they gave him porridge. So the hostess asked him, "How did you
like the porridge Mr. Johnson." So the Scots have always been found of oats, but this has not been the case in North America until this interesting little episode. And that really popularized oats, particularly Quaker Oats. Everyone wanted to eat it because all of sudden it became a health food. It is indeed healthy, although there are no single foods that can be classified as angels and others denigrated as devils. We have to look at the overall diet. But if you put oats into your diet and in particular steel cut oats, I think that those are very tasty, you can indeed lower your cholesterol. However, you have to look at numbers. In science we want to be quantitative, not only qualitative. When someone who is scientifically minded is told that you can lower your cholesterol by eating oats there are specific questions that immediately pop into mind. 1) How much do you have to eat? and 2) How much can you lower your cholesterol? We want numerical answers. And the answers here are not that attractive. You have to eat a lot of oats in order to have an impact on your cholesterol level. How much? Well, the particular kind of fiber, known as soluble fiber, that lowers cholesterol is beta glucan. You eat about a cup of oat bran. It isn't always easy to do that because oat bran is not one of God's gifts to the palette. Oatmeal is more tasty and you can do that. Porridge is, of course, just another form of oatmeal. One and half cups a day, cooked oatmeal we're talking about, can have a very significant lowering of cholesterol level, plus it also gives you some insoluble fiber which is great for the intestine and generally it will also help dieters because it will fill you up and it will make you eat less of other stuff. So I am a great proponent of oats, although they are not miracles. There is no single food that is a miracle. Cheerios has recently discovered that the O in Cheerios stands for oat bran. Prior to all of this stuff, they probably didn't even realize that they were making their product out of oats. But now it has become a health food. But you also have to eat a lot of Cheerios in order to have 3 grams of beta glucan. As you can see about 5 servings. Although I'm sure that General Mills the maker of Cheerios is working on making a bigger Cheerio so that we don't have to eat quite as many in order to get the beta glucan. You know today we are accustomed to talking about foods in terms of are they were good for us or not, is it healthy or not. But you know that is a relatively new concept. Because today we have the luxury of talking about these things, especially in North America because we don't have to worry about not having enough food, at least most of us don't. We don't appreciate the fact that every 3.7 seconds someone in the world dies, purely from not having enough food. So we have the luxury of worrying about whether our food is genetically modified or whether or not there are specific additives in our food. Most of the world is quite happy just to have food to eat. So what about this business of the health connection that we worry about. The notion that you are what you eat. Where does this trace back to? Well, actually the first person to start talking about this was Hippocrates a couple of thousand year ago when he said "Let thy food be thy medicine." This was pretty good advice. Although he was not very clear about what you should eat. He didn't know that. He knew that there was a relationship between food and health. Of course, Hippocrates also thought that rubbing pigeon dung on a bald head would grow hair. So he was not the ultimate fount of good information. It was this gentleman, however, who first gave us what was really quite solid advice about what we should eat and how it connects with health. This was Sylvester Graham. Graham was a Presbyterian minister, the son of a Presbyterian minister, in the 1800s in New England. And in those days ministers made a living by going around from congregation to congregation giving sermons and then putting out the proverbial hat and if people liked what they heard, they would support the preacher. He began by preaching abstinence from alcohol. As you can imagine this did not go down well in New England in those days, when the traditional breakfast was bacon washed down with whiskey. So people didn't want to hear that. So he had branched out into another area. So he decided that he would become a nutritional expert. Of course, he never studied any nutrition, but he became a nutritional expert and he had a nutritional scheme. He said that there were some things that we should just not do in life. And for that he became known as Dr. No—the original Dr. No. Because he said, no meat. Why no meat? Because he said that it would inflame the passion. He suggested that it would make people engage in activities that he thought should be reserved for procreation only. Because these activities robbed the body of energy so that you wouldn't have enough energy left to maintain health or to cure yourself from disease if you got ill. He also suggested no spices, no caffeine, no alcohol, and no doctors. Which to be honest with you in the 1800s was not a bad idea. Because, in those day,s what did doctors do? They purged patients, they bled patients. If you got better it was usually in spite of the doctor not because of him. So that was not bad advice. But he reserved his more venomous attacks against meat. Because this was sexually inflammatory he said and it would cause people to do horrific things. What kind of horrific things? Well, for example, an activity that was classically discussed in the Seinfeld episode known as "The Contest," where this activity was never talked about by name, but everyone knew exactly what was being referred to. And this is also what Graham suggested. He said that people who ate meat, were led astray, destined to take matters in to their own hands and this would rob their body of energy, and that's why they were constantly sick. So he said, leave meat alone, go on a whole grain, vegetable diet and you will be better. That was good advice. In fact it was the same kind of advice we give today, but not for the same reason. He was quite wrong about meat inflaming the passion, but he was correct about the advice that was given. So if you want to eat, what would you eat? Well, you would eat graham crackers. The world's first anti-sex food although of course if is no longer being marketed in that particular fashion. But that was the origin and people who started to eat more fruits and vegetable and more whole grains, probably were better off because the traditional diet in those days was really atrocious. Today we have many nutritional gurus who have followed in the footsteps of Sylverster Graham, some with equally outlandish ideas. When you walk into any book store today and you begin to wonder why it is that we train physicians and nutritionists when we have all of this advice that is readily available. Any disease that is known to mankind can be cured just by having the right diet or by staying away from certain foods. Well, I like to pick on some of these books. And this is one that I particularly enjoy taking a poke at. This is really an anti-science book. Now before I go on and tell you all of the terrible things that this book does and has in it, I should suggest that the diet that the authors end up recommending is not a bad diet. They end up recommending mostly a vegetarian, whole grain diet, so I don't have any complaints about that. They also end up recommending a system of food combining, such as not eating proteins with carbohydrates and not eating anything but fruits before noon, they tell you, don't worry about the diarrhea. All of this. Anyway, the diet is not bad, but all of the nonsense behind it and explanations, it is terrible. It pollutes the mind and creates an anti-science environment. Let me give you a classic paragraph from this book. Hold your chairs. "Within atoms and molecules reside the vital elements we know of as enzymes. Enzymes are not things or substances. They are the life principles in the atoms and molecules of every living cell." I first saw this, handwritten. It was brought to me by a student. I had not read the book at the time. She wanted to know what this was about. Gee, you know this must be some kind of joke. Someone must have sat down and said to themselves, what is the greatest amount of silliness that can be put into the fewest words. I think this is a candidate for that. Obviously enzymes are things, they are real, you can put them in a bottle. You can put them on a shelf. These deluded people seem to have the idea that enzymes are some ethereal substances, perhaps akin to the human soul—which we may or may not have. I don't know. Some of us may and others not. But in any case you cannot put it into a bottle. What they suggest is that when you process food, you kill the food because you destroy its enzymes. Now enzymes, of course, have real biological value. We couldn't live without enzymes, but we produce all of the enzymes we need intracellularly. We do not need them from an outside source, and we cannot use them from an outside source because they are metabolites like any other protein. But this is the kind of nonsense that they disseminate. They also tell us that you don't want a microwave oven in your kitchen because it is like living next to a nuclear reactor. Well, I could even argue that living next to a nuclear reactor is not a bad place to live because there will be very few traffic accidents there. But never mind that. The suggestion that microwaves somehow are akin to nuclear radiation is ridiculous and it just scares people. They delve into every area of our life, including our love life. Believe it or not the authors tell us that you must not have female orgasm during pregnancy because it cuts off the oxygen to the fetus and results in inferior brain development. Now I don't have any idea where they would pick up something like that. Even if you had such a hypothesis, how you would go about testing this? [laughter] They tell that the greatest threat to health is processed foods, such as sliced bread. Now I'm not going to tell you that sliced white bread is a great source of nutrition. Of course, it's not. And of course, we should be eating whole grain breads as much as possible. I will however tell you that people have survived eating white bread. It is not a toxin as they imply. They tell us that processed foods such as this are a great threat to health because chemicals are used to process them. Here again, chemicals are synonymous with poison. Yes, processed foods do use chemicals. Why? Because we know that if you don't add a preservative to white bread like this, within a couple of days this is what happens. And market studies have shown that people do not buy this kind of bread. [laughter]. So because of that we add the preservative. The preservative that is used is calcium propionate. A very effective preservative because it is a good mold inhibitor, but it allows yeast to thrive, which is exactly what you want in bread. But then they get worried because there is a chemical in their bread. Well, first of all I think it is important to point out that bakers and other food processors cannot just randomly put additives into foods. It doesn't work like that. You have to apply to be allowed to put certain additives in and you have to satisfy the government and it takes lots of studies in order to do that. There are all kinds of regulatory hoops and hurdles. So by the time an additive is approved there is a lot of information to suggest the benefits outweigh the risks. In the case of calcium propionate there really is no problem, because we have lots of it in our bodies anyway. It is a byproduct of metabolism. Whenever we take in fat we produce propionic acid and propionate. In fact we sweat preservatives. If you analyze your underarm sweat you will find calcium propionate in there. Which is interesting because it explains a feature of French life. If any of you have ever been to France, and purchased a baguette, you know that they are delicious. But you have to eat them within about 19 seconds of buying them because they don't have any preservatives so they will go moldy and they will go hard. You know the Frenchman's traditional way of carrying the baguette home, [laughter] which is the ultimate preservative process and its all natural of course. In talking about these things, how can we not talk about interesting things like cleanliness and cleaning. I had a lady call me up. She wants to know about this particular cleaning agent, which happens to be a good one, Hertel Plus. She has been reading the liquid ingredients on there and finds sodium tripolyphosphate, she calls me up wants to know if this is a chemical? Well, right away I know where this conversation is going because what she is really asking is is this dangerous? Is this poisonous, is this toxic? Because in her mind, of course, that's what a chemical is. So of course, I go through my usual spiel, telling her that everything in the world is made of chemicals. If you're buying something without any chemicals then you are not getting a very good deal, because you are buying a vacuum. And I think I was able to explain to her that the phosphate is in there to combine with minerals in the water which would interfere with the activity of the detergent. And she bought it because after all if you expect to see chemicals somewhere it is in cleaning agents. That's okay. That's where they belong. But two weeks later she calls me again, panic in her voice. She has again found sodium tripolyphosphate, but this time on a different label. This time it was on a food label and it happened to be Kraft dinner. So she calls up and she says, Look, "I feed my son Kraft dinner every single day" —apparently something that was of no concern to her. But what was of concern was that it contained tripolyphosphate and she wanted to know why a cleaning agent was in the Kraft dinner. She knew that eating this was messy business and she wondered if the company has developed a secret process to clean her son from the inside out. [laughter] Of course, I explained to her that this was not the situation. The phosphate was put in there because it enhances water absorption by the macaroni. So she can give her son the macaroni —which apparently was the only thing she was ever feeding him— very rapidly. I'm not sure that she was satisfied with this. Cleaning agents are one thing. There the phosphate agents are fine, but you don't want them in your food. Even though I explained to her that phosphates occur in nature, that every time you take a bite of meat you get far more phosphates naturally then you would get in the macaroni. Where do they get such ideas? Well, from reading books like this book about food additive. Imagine if my phosphate fearing friend looked it up in this book. What would she find? Obtained from phosphate rock. Highly alkaline. Shampoos. Cuticle softeners Bubble baths. All of that makes sense. Then to find that it is also used in incendiary bombs and tracer bullets. Now not only would she worry about her son being cleaned from the inside out. Now she begins to worry about him exploding and disappearing, although probably not without a trace. [laughter] The author has made a fundamental chemical error. She has confused phosphorus with phosphates. Phosphorus indeed was used in incendiary bullets. Phosphorus is the element. When you combine it with oxygen to form phosphate it has completely different chemical properties. This is tantamount to saying that water is a dangerous substance because it has hydrogen. And you know what hydrogen can do. You remember the Hindenburg. You remember the Challenger. Hydrogen is very explosive. Therefore you have to worry about water. Of course, when hydrogen combines with oxygen you get something that is quite different in physical properties. Such is the case here as well. But it is very difficult to get these ideas across to people who have literally no scientific background whatsoever. These books tend to be sensational and sensational ideas sell. People want to know about what to worry about. Everyone of course, it is a natural thing to worry. And they cater to that. They give them things to worry about that needn't be worried about. One of the most important things in life I think is knowing what to worry about. You don't want to waste your worries. Worrying is very stressful. There are enough things to worry about beside phosphate in macaroni. They also get these ideas from "they." The all inclusive, wise "they." Who know everything. They say that. Well this "they say" can be a problematic business. I'll give you an example. Remember the old days of playing telephone when you were kids. You would whisper something into someone's ear and they would whisper it into the next person's ear, etc. And by the time it has gone through a channel of whispers, the information would come out very different. I find this all the time. I will do something on radio or TV and I will hear what I said or what I did and it will be quite different from what actually happened because people are not very good observers. You know that if you have 10 witnesses to a traffic accident then, you'll get 8 different stories. Right? People are not very good observers and they do jump to the wrong conclusions. I'll give you a classic example. One day I was talking about a particular kind of color - cochineal red, which is very often used to color cherries like Marichino cherries. It is also used to color cherry ice cream and strawberry ice cream. It is a fascinating dye which comes from an insect source. These small insects are raised on cacti in Mexico and the southern U.S., the Canary Islands. And the female of the species produces a red juice, which can be processed into a very effective dye for coloring ice cream. These insects are very small. Smaller than a cockroach. This is a dye that has been used for centuries and is one of the best time-tested products. I told this story on the radio very much like I told it to you here today. What happens? A couple of days later I get a letter from a lady who says that she has told this story to her friend, who refused to believe it. And she was now asking me to confirm in writing that there are cockroaches in chocolate ice cream. Well you can see what happened. She heard the word ice cream. She heard the word cockroach, which was only used to describe the size of the insect. Maybe not the most appropriate analogy. I had never mentioned chocolate, but that must have been her favorite ice cream. I had talked about strawberry and cherry. She had picked up a few smidgens of truth and metamorphosed them in her mind into something that was completely different. And undoubtedly probably caused anxiety in her friend, who is probably a chocolate ice cream lover and now thought that chocolate ice cream was colored with cockroach juice. So you can see how important it is to try to communicate effectively and to get the information across. Incidentally there is nothing wrong with coloring with insect extract. I mean that's just a personal, social upbringing issue. Why is it that people's mouths water at the thought of eating the rear end of a cow, which is what steak is and they are horrified by the prospect of a little bug juice in their strawberry ice cream? So there's really nothing wrong with that, but I'm sure that there is a lot of needless anxiety created here. So what we need to do is powerful education. From early on in life we need to get kids thinking scientifically. We need to promote scientific education at all levels and to foster critical thinking. But it is not an easy challenge. Especially because people are not good observers and are not very adept at coming to the right conclusions based upon the observation. And we are challenged by one other problem in our attempt to communicate science. And that is that we can never have conclusive answers. And we can never say that something cannot be, that it is totally nonsensical. There is always a maybe. That's why so many scientific publications are infused with perhaps and maybe and if, etc. Because it is rare that you can say something absolutely conclusively. And we all have keep in mind that as scientists we are certainly not infallible. We have to keep an open mind. Obviously, not so open that our brain falls out. But an open mind, because stuff happens that is unexpected and we have to be ready for it. And I'll give you my final example about that. Remember a couple of years ago, when Coca Cola came out with New Coke. This was because they had been engaged in a long battle with Pepsi. And Pepsi had set up these booths in shopping centers where they were doing the Pepsi Challenge. They were giving people Pepsi and Coke and asking them which was better. Much to Coke's dislike, people liked Pepsi too often. So they decided that they needed a marketing gimmick of their own. And they approached their advertising agency and agency told them "Look, Americans like new and improved, so come up with New Coke." Boy was that bad advice. Americans may like new and improved but not in every facet of life. There are some things you don't play around with, motherhood, apple pie, baseball, and Coca Cola. They changed the formulation, slightly. I mean only so that they could say that there was a change. Nothing of any importance. But, of course, there was a rebellion among the masses, who didn't want Coca Cola played around with. And there was tremendous concern. They started Old Coke Drinkers clubs, they hoarded the product etc. Eventually Coke relented and they reintroduced Coca Cola Classic and now New Coke has been phased out. And now we have the old Coke, which has become the new Coke etc. But about 15 months after the introduction of the New Coke, scientists began to hear some reports from certain areas in Africa about an increase in the birth rate. And no one could understand this because it was in the little villages where Coca Cola consumption was said to be very high. And a few researchers even suggested that there had to be a connection. That somehow the increase in birth rate was too tied in with the introduction of New Coke. Of course, most scientists said this was absurd. There can't possibly be any such connection. Until two Harvard researchers decided to investigate. They found that indeed there was a connection. It seems the ladies in these villages were not using Cocoa Cola as a delicious, refreshing beverage. They were using is as a contraceptive. Well how does one do that? I'll leave that to your imagination. I'll just tell you that you don't drink it. You make use of its spermicidal properties. Now, of course, as the researchers heard this they said maybe, but is it testable. So they went into the laboratory and got some sperm. And you know these little guys like to swim. So they put them in a petri dish. And they decided to measure what is called the sperm motility. How quickly they swim. So they measured it in Coca Classic and found the sperm motility. Then they took New Coke measured it and what did they find. Sperm motility, five times greater. These little guy were five times more active in New Coke than Old Coke and there was the answer. New Coke was not as effective a spermicide as Old Coke had been. Now just why that is the case nobody knows. The Coca Cola company did call a press conference, but the only comment they had was that Coke markets itself as a delicious, refreshing beverage. [laughter] And then you know how researchers are. They like to push the envelope. So you tested Old Coke and New Coke so you better test other soft drinks too. So they decided to test Diet Coke and discovered something staggering. Sperm motility was zero. Which of course leads us to the final scientific conclusion, based upon the observations, that as far as chemical contraception goes: Diet Coke is it. Right? Well that's it for me too. Except for one little finale to this whole enterprise. Which comes for two reasons 1) My publisher insists that I always mention that there are books to be purchased and the other is that because there is story with that too that is very illustrative of our attempts at communicating science and some of the pitfalls. Two years ago when I was approached to put together a book, I said yes I would be happy to do that but I want it to be called, The Right Chemistry. Because I was so tired of all the perjoratives with chemicals, you know dangerous chemical, toxic chemical. I wanted The Right Chemistry. And the publisher thought, "Yeah, that's a pretty good idea." And I put together the book and they thought it was interesting. And everything was just about set until I get a call from him saying that he had been showing this to his sales people in the U.S. and while they liked the book, and they liked all the stories in there about the discovery of gunpowder, and why Rasputin wasn't poisoned by cyanide and how to remove skunk smell and the link between vitamin E and heart disease and how selenium may prevent certain cancers and all that, and the ups and downs of underwear. But you can't call it, The Right Chemistry, he told me. I said, "Why not." Because it's a scary word. People are not interested in chemistry. It frightens them. They think about fomulas, they think about equations. Only the nerds are going to buy it and they don't spend money. So what do you want? You have to change the title. You have to have something a bit more captivating. Do you have any suggestions? This is when he brought up the idea that one of the chapters in the book, "Radar, Hola Hoops and Pig Balls, " at the time. And it was a chapter about polyethylene, which was used as sheathing material around radar cables during the second World War, and helped win the war. After the war is was used in hula hoops, which was a financial windfall for the inventor. And then a clever farmer realized that his pigs that were biting each other when they were in close confinement on the ear and on the tail which required antibiotics which is expensive. They were doing this because they were bored and they could be entertained with polyethylene balls, which were pig balls and then they would leave each other alone. These were the pig balls. That was the title of the chapter. That's what they wanted to call the book. I said well no. I'll go for the radar, I'll go for the hula hoops, but I'm no pig ball man. And I suggested therefore, playful pigs. Which also meant that the cover had to be changed because the test tubes and other things that were on the cover were no longer applicable. So they hired a graphic artist who came up with this cover design, which has flying pigs. Which is a problem. Flying pigs and science don't go together that well. But it was too late. And I kind of liked the pigs, they were cute. But the major problem was that the story has nothing about flying pigs. The pigs were walking pigs in the story. So I had to go back and rewrite that piece of the story so that now there are legitimate flying pigs in there, scientifically flying pigs. Anyway. I did this and the book sold well in Canada. I thought that by the time it comes to the next one, I would be allowed to call it The Right Chemistry. No. The publisher said, people are scared of chemistry. You have to come up with something else. So it did. I have had a long infatuation with Barbara Eden, who used to play in I Dream of Jeanie, in the old TV show. That was my favorite show when I was a kid. Even then I remember wondering about how she came out of the bottle with this puff of smoke. I discovered when I was in graduate school that it was a chemical reaction, that they used. Hydogen peroxide, they found, under the influence of MnO2, maganese dioxide mixed with water is exothermic and you get the steam. All you have to do is mix the two chemicals and etc. And that always intrigued me. And then two years ago when I was out in Vancouver, on behalf of the Discovery Channel doing a trade show in their booth. As luck would have it next to us was the Arts & Entertainment booth, A&E and they had just bought the rights to the old I Dream of Jeanie TV show. And who was there to promote this, Barbara Eden. So as you can imagine, I hightailed it over there. I got into a conversation with her. Did she remember how she got out of the bottle and she said she told me she didn't even remember how she got in it. [laughter] And I described to her the chemistry. I even showed her the chemical reaction. I thought, Gee, if she thinks this is neat, it really is. I can use this reaction to be the focus of the next book. And it turned out to be the case, and it became the Genie in the Bottle. Because it did allow me give that particular account and also because I like the idea of the Genie in the Bottle as a metaphor for science. Because I think science can do absolutely marvelous things if it is handled properly. It is just like a genie in the bottle. But you have to be careful about letting the genie out. Because once it's out you can't put it back into the bottle. So I like that idea about the metaphor about the care we have to take with science, and of course I also like story about Barbara Eden. And now I thought that maybe the next book, I'm going to be allowed to call it The Right Chemistry, but that's not going to happen either. It is going to be called, That's the Way the Cookie Crumbles. And maybe by the fourth one I will have done enough groundwork to do it. But probably not. Because I think that the publisher is right. And that's the bottom line of this whole story. If it were called The Right Chemistry it probably wouldn't interest people that much and it wouldn't capture the imagination. Because they don't think of chemistry as a positive thing in life, as potentially interesting. So sometimes you do have to sugar coat it a little bit in order to get people to taste it. And once they taste it, I think that they will like it. So although at first I wasn't particularly found of catering to public misconceptions, I think that there is certain extent to which you have to do that. If that's what it takes to capture the attention. So I hope that I been able to get across some ideas about what it takes to communicate science to the public. And some of the misconceptions out there. And why I think that it is such as important job. Because when people are ignorant of science they will be more anxious than they should be about things that they do not need to be anxious about. They will ignore other things that are worth worrying about and they will very often fall into the clutches of charlatans. Because when science doesn't have the answer, the quacks will rush in to fill that void unless we arm the public with enough weaponry to make sure that that doesn't happen. And we can do that by properly spreading scientific information, making sure people understand that chemists are not different from other people. But we do possess the vocabulary and the equipment to make life not only more interesting but more understandable for everyone. Thank you.
Created: 8/25/02
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