It’s been a month of interesting times for anti-vaccinationists in Australia, with a slew of commentary, media campaigns, documentaries, and even political condemnation for their failure to follow international health guidelines—to the point that in the state of New South Wales, they’re even considering getting religious exemptions en masse to avoid new vaccination policies.

We cannot claim that a single person or group is behind these changes; to do so is to neglect the hundreds and thousands of people who have raised their voices in many different ways. It takes more than a Facebook group, or a spokesperson, or even a whole newspaper to keep momentum going when it comes to public health—particularly with a solution to preventable deaths that has gained unnecessary and dangerous levels of controversy. While I usually despair when it comes to mainstream media’s coverage of pseudoscientific claims, particularly when it comes to eager attitudes about (false) balance, I’ve been personally overawed by the support for vaccinations on a number of fronts. Here’s a few of the highlights.

One massive newspaper campaign in NSW, which was then echoed by a number of other media outlets, has been particularly influential—the “No Jab, No Play” campaign, which started on May 5 and ran for two weeks. Stories included personal accounts of family tragedies and resilience (such as the Dana McCaffery case), regional effects of low vaccination rates, and even political pressure resulting in changed laws in support of vaccination. Other media outlets, like the Sydney Morning Herald and Herald Sun, soon echoed the pro-vaccination rally.

I wrote to Claire Harvey, the Features Editor for the Sunday Telegraph, News Limited, as to how the campaign started:

Basically it started because I was searching for a childcare centre in NSW and became aware of the loophole in the law. I asked Sunday Telegraph editor Mick Carroll and Daily Telegraph editor Paul Whittaker if they were keen to let me run a campaign. They were - so I assigned reporters led by Jane Hansen to about thirty-five story ideas and we approached state and federal governments telling them what we were about to do. Neither had a commitment to change the law so we started rolling out the stories from May 5th.

We ran approximately sixty stories and by two weeks later, NSW Opposition leader John Robertson and Tony Abbott both said they would act. Robertson said he would introduce bills to parliament - whereupon premier Barry O'Farrell announced he'd put a plan to Cabinet that went even further than Robertson's proposed bill. We are still campaigning for federal change - although Abbott is on board, we'd rather have legislation before parliament than a promise.

We have copped a huge amount of vitriol and nastiness but also vast support from our readers. Our heartland is western Sydney, where the vast majority of parents vaccinate. Their children's health is put at risk by parents in wealthy parts of Sydney where rates are much lower, and in 'alternative lifestyle' areas like Byron Bay where rates are shockingly low.

We are proud to have changed the law but now we want to help change people's attitudes by continuing to report the facts about vaccinations - they save lives.

On May 9 in the New South Wales House of Assembly, the Minister for Fair Trading, the Honourable Anthony Roberts, presented a speech in reply to the question “What action is the Government taking to protect the community from being misled by the Australian Vaccination Network?” He outlined the Government’s actions to finally enforce the change of the highly misleading name of the anti-vaccination group, the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN):

Just the day before, in the Upper House, the 2013 Health Legislation Amendment Bill passed, prior to being sent to become law. The Hansard transcript includes a number of interchanges in support of vaccination, including:

The Hon. TREVOR KHAN: …The Australian Vaccination Network publishes a website that could be described as highly sceptical, indeed far more than that.

The Hon. Dr PETER PHELPS: I think “insane” is the word you are looking for.

As the Telegraph continued their No Jab, No Play Campaign, on May 26 the documentary “Jabbed: Love, Fear and Vaccines” was aired on the TV station SBS—directed by award-winning documentary maker Sonya Pemberton. While the reach of the documentary was limited, due to SBS being a traditionally low-rating and occasionally difficult to tune into station, the film was made available via internet streaming and for purchase through the website. Reviews were favourable, such as this one on the AusMed site by Janet McCalman, which particularly notes the documentary’s effort not to judge families regarding their choices. A forum with the director Sonya Pemberton is planned for Wednesday, June 5 in Melbourne.

The Conversation website, known as an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community, ran an interview on the May 27, “Pneumococcal rates plunge after widespread vaccination of infants.” It was conducted by the editor, Sunanda Creagh, with Public Health Physician Clayton Chiu and Professor of Pediatric Infectious Diseases David Isaacs, on the plunging rates of pneumococcal rates as a result of widespread vaccination. In it, they discussed the benefits of vaccinations, particularly “because of the herd immunity we get in the community.”

On May 29, the Telegraph ran the story “Big win for No Jab, No Play as NSW state cabinet approves tough new vaccination laws,” announcing that Health Minister Jillian Skinner amended the Public Health Act to make the checking of vaccine records compulsory—and to give staff the power to turn away those who aren't up to date. That same day, opinion columnist Janet Albrechtsen wrote “Zealots Forget The Epidemics” for the Commentary pages in the national broadsheet The Australian:

“According to our federal Department of Health, there is a whooping cough epidemic in this country…it’s not hard to figure out why. In Australia, up to one in five children in some regions are not fully immunised…Recent moves by NSW Labor Opposition Leader John Robertson and federal Liberal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott to empower childcare centres to refuse care to unvaccinated children are a good start, but let’s go further. No parent should receive tax benefits if they refuse to vaccinate their children.”

This was also the day that Bill Gates arrived in Australia—and as a staunch advocate (and financial backer) of vaccination, he was reported voicing his support in a number of news items and radio shows, particularly for his address at the National Press Club in Canberra and on ABC’s panel program Q&A.

By May 30, the Daily Telegraph was reporting on how Meryl Dorey of the Australian Vaccination Network had “urged followers on social media to join the ‘Church of Conscious Living’ as a way of avoiding vaccination laws,” which included the rejection of vaccination for adults, children, and animals. This will not be the end of challenges against vaccination, but at least with raised awareness and hastened responses to improving flawed laws and limited regulations, the month of May will hopefully be a significant turning point for improving vaccination rates in Australia.

Many thanks to Claire Harvey for her quotes for this article.

Ankylosaur Attack was just the first book in the Tales of Prehistoric Life series from Kids Can Press. Pterosaur Trouble is out now and those attending the next Amazing Meeting in July will be treated to a preview of the book co-authored with fellow Skeptic.com blogger Professor Donald Prothero, Abominable Science!: Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids.

Daniel has written for critical thinking publications including Skeptic, Skeptical Briefs, eSkeptic and the Skeptical Inquirer, and contributed cover art to Skeptic, Yes mag, and Free Inquiry.

Kylie Sturgess: Firstly, there's a lot of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals to choose from—why this pterosaur, Quetzalcoatlus?

Daniel Loxton: First of all, Quetzalcoatlus is just inherently awesome. These critters and their close relatives were the largest fliers the world has ever known—like, the size of a small airplane. The preposterousness of a creature that large taking to the air is just totally seductive. We're talking about animals that could, as Tetrapod Zoology's Darren Naish and other pterosaur enthusiasts like to point out, look a giraffe in the eyes while standing on all fours.

But what cinched this animal as the focus for Book Two of my Tales of Prehistoric Life series was learning of a specific fossil find by a young woman named Wendy Sloboda and other staffers and volunteers at the Royal Tyrrell Museum: bones from Quetzalcoatlus or a similarly enormous close relative that had been gnawed on by the small, Velociraptor-like dinosaur Saurornitholestes in Cretaceous Alberta. That's an almost Lilliputian scenario: a giant devoured by dinosaurs much, much smaller than it. How did that happen? Was the big pterosaur scavenged, or did the little dinosaurs somehow manage to hunt it successfully? The more conservative scavenging possibility is discussed in the nonfiction page at the back of the book, but I couldn't resist letting the most spectacular interpretation inspire my paleofiction bedtime story….

Kylie: What's involved in the process of creating a picture book like this - the stages and revision?

Daniel: The goal for Pterosaur Trouble and the other Tales of Prehistoric Life series books is persuasive photorealism—or heightened realism, anyway. I want it to look like I just popped back in time with my camera and took some nature photographs. That concept constrains every aspect of the creation of the illustrations. Let me tell you, the step between “cool computer generated representation of a prehistoric animal,” and “Hey, that looks real!” is a doozy.

Achieving that realism, or at least reaching for it, is a process that takes many months of painstaking steps and revisions. At its most basic, we create computer generated (CG) creatures and composite them into real world location photographs. Huge, high-resolution, panoramic photo mosaics are shot on location, which form the foundation for the backgrounds. I alter those extensively however—adding in foliage, taking out tourists, altering landscapes and sky however the story requires. Likewise, the massive sixty-seven megapixel texture maps for each animal's skin are built up from real world photoreference from live animals, museum specimens, roadkill, my friends and relatives, and even a Christmas dinner.

Pterosaur Trouble especially benefitted from behind-the-scenes access to extensively photograph bird and bat specimens from the collections at the Royal British Columbia Museum.

Once the creatures are designed, sculpted, textured, and posed, I design a virtual lighting scheme to match the lighting conditions present in the background photography. Then I render the animals out in many passes, using a 3D rendering program on a computer: a pass for the diffuse light, a pass for reflections, a pass for specular highlights, a pass for fill light, and so on. Some passes take days each to render at the massive resolutions I need for print.

I render twenty or thirty such passes for each illustration, then stack those up in Photoshop and begin to really get to work. The magic happens (assuming it happens at all!) in the very last steps of this compositing process of blending together many elements into a seamless, photorealist whole. It's a complicated and lengthy process that has to be done in a certain sequence. The illustration can't come to life until you get to Step Z—but if you don't get the foundational work for Steps A, B, and C right several months earlier, then Step Z won't ever spark the way you hope it will.

(For those who are interested in more details, I described some of the steps involved in creating the art for Ankylosaur Attack here and here.)

Kylie: Looking over the illustrations, there seems to be a lot of envious dinosaurs checking out the Pterosaur's flight! What are some of the considerations that you have to take into account when creating dinosaur art—particularly so many different kinds?

Daniel: Paleoartists tend very strongly to follow the lead of other paleoartists. That's natural—by and large, we're artists, not scientists. We speak art, we read art, and we learn from art, as artists have for millennia. So we wind up conforming, very often, to the conventions and reconstructions of other artists. That's why virtually every depiction of the pliosaur Liopleurodon since 2000 has given the animal a black and white pattern, from illustrations to toys: it's the way that the texture artists of the Walking With Dinosaurs television series did theirs, and theirs was the awesomest.

There is an interesting meta-conversation happening now in paleoart circles, with projects like the new book All Yesterdays by John Conway, C. M. Kosemen, and Darren Naish seeking to deconstruct some of the conventions of our practice. These creatures were ordinary animals in their time, after all, not movie monsters. They must have spent a lot more time strolling, playing, and having naps than they spent struggling titanically for survival—but you wouldn't know it by the ubiquitous action shots we depict in dinosaur art.

Pterosaur Trouble and Ankylosaur Attack are intended for kids, so your readers won't be surprised to hear that there is indeed a big fight in each book. But I wanted to show these animals doing other stuff, too: ankylosaurs honking curiously at the animals in the sky, pterosaurs ignoring the goings on the ground, animals waking up or poking about for breakfast, or just plain traveling on.

Kylie: What do you consult when it comes to accuracy, particularly when new discoveries are made (e.g. movement of dinosaurs)?

Daniel: For the first book, Ankylosaur Attack, I relied to begin with on my own knowledge and research. Paleontologists Donald Prothero and Jason Loxton looked over the illustrations for me informally, as I completed each one, and ankylosaur expert Ken Carpenter kindly vetted the nonfiction section at the back of that book.

For Pterosaur Trouble and the third book (in production now) we brought in paleozoologist Darren Naish right at the beginning of the process, to help me keep the book grounded in real science at every step—sculpting, illustration, plot, and story. That has been tremendously helpful—not only to help me avoid factual errors (like this one I corrected in Ankylosaur Attack after it was published) but also to illuminate new possibilities for science-based storytelling.

Kylie: I noticed (and it's fantastic timing with your book coming out!) some press on “9-Year-Old Girl Gets Dinosaur Named After Her, Makes All Other Children/Adults Jealous,” and yet I also noticed some criticism about the media labeling of Pterosaurs as dinosaurs. Is misidentification that much of an issue?

Daniel: That's a lovely story, and I was delighted to learn of it. You're right, though: many sources misidentified the creature young Daisy Morris discovered as a “dinosaur,” which it was not. Even outlets like Popular Science identified her discovery as “a small species of pterosaur, a flying dinosaur.” In reality, pterosaurs were reptiles of another branch altogether—calling them “dinosaurs” is like calling you a marsupial. As Written in Stone author Brian Switek put it for Smithsonian Magazine, “A pterosaur is no more a dinosaur than a goldfish is a shark.”

A lot of people seem to regard that distinction as “paleo-pedantry.” That reaction sort of baffles me. Why call anything what it is? Why make any factual distinctions? If we're going to talk about stuff, teach, popularize, we might as well value accuracy.

Kylie: What do you have next in the works?

Daniel: I'm working now on Book Three of the Tales of Prehistoric Life series, which will feature plesiosaurs (which were, incidentally, also not dinosaurs). That will be out next year. Before that, though, is my book Abominable Science for Columbia University Press, co-authored with Don Prothero. That's a hefty non-fiction book on legendary animals (“cryptids”) such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, examined through a critical lens. It should hit stores in the middle of 2013.

You can follow Daniel Loxton on his blog at Skeptic Blogs.

Dr. Ben Goldacre is a best-selling author, broadcaster, medical doctor and academic who specialises in unpicking dodgy scientific claims from drug companies, newspapers, government reports, PR people and quacks. As of 2012, he is a Wellcome research fellow in epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

His first book, Bad Science, sold over 400,000 copies, is published in eighteen countries, and reached #1 in the UK paperback non-fiction charts. His new book, Bad Pharma, which exposes bad behavior in the pharmaceutical industry, was published at the end of 2012.

For this interview, we discuss the extent of the problems that face the medical establishment—the ramifications of an unscrupulous alliance between the pharmaceutical industry and regulators, the suppression of negative studies revealing many drugs to be either ineffective or less effective than those they seek to replace—and what we can do to solve these problems, including the new petition AllTrials.net, for the publication of clinical trial results, at www.alltrials.net.

Dr. Ben Goldacre: I think it would be wrong to imply that it is melodramatic or controversial to say that there are flaws in evidence‑based medicine. The book Bad Pharma really is about the aspirations of evidence‑based medicine and how we have failed to meet those. It about how trials work, but it's also about how trials can be flawed by certain design quirks. It's about how we hope that doctors make decisions based on the results of good summaries of the evidence that's been collected—but in reality we've got very flawed mechanisms for disseminating such evidence to doctors and patients, which means it's very vulnerable to being gamed by marketing departments at drug companies. In addition, half of all clinical trials for the drugs that we use have never been published.

It's not really that there was some sudden, big, dramatic moment that led me to write the book; it was more that there were all of these very well documented problems throughout the whole of medicine that we teach students about when they do epidemiology Masters courses or to medical students when they're doing their evidence‑based medicine module. I thought it would be useful and interesting to share those shortcomings with the public. Partly because they're just interesting!

I'm a nerd, obviously. I like stats and evidence and I study design, but I think everybody does, really. It's the answer to the question, “How do you know if something works or doesn't work?” I'm actually talking about the flaws in trials; that is the best way, really, to talk about how trials are supposed to be designed. That's how you teach things. When you're talking about how to design a proper trial, you do so by using flawed trials in the context of a journal club or whatever and talking about their flaws.

Also, I think, something that's worth talking to the public about because I think we've been insufficiently ambitious in medicine about fixing these problems. The clearest example of that is the problem of publication bias. Publication bias comes about because half of all trials that are conducted and completed have never been published, so the evidence that we do have is completely distorted and biased. I think that we've failed to fix all of those problems behind closed doors in medicine. We've failed to fix those problems quietly and discretely in professional discussions amongst the senior medical academic bodies and industry regulators.

I think the time has come to discuss these more openly with the public. It's not a melodramatic book. It just gives a very straight description of all of these problems.

Kylie Sturgess: The findings that you uncovered are quite shocking—trial studies being withheld, the accounts you write about Roche and the European Medicines Agency withholding clinical data trials from Cochrane. At certain points, I thought this is incredible, it's almost bordering on the absurd, let alone tragic…

Ben: I agree. First of all, it's important to be clear that a lot of it isn't new. The finding that half of all studies have never been published; that's not a revelation that I've made, that comes from the NHS, health technology appraisal people who use very good monographs and they’ve produced a systematic review just two years ago that looked at all of the evidence on missing data. That's where the finding that half of all trials have never been published comes from. It's not something that I made up out of thin air and it's not a revelation!

I can't remember who says it, but there was an investigative journalist who said that sometimes a clearer explanation of a well‑documented technical problem, that's protected from public scrutiny by a wall of modest complexity, is valid as a piece of investigative journalism. That's what I've done. I'm not sure I'd necessarily call it investigative journalism, I think it's just…it's pop science, just a clear explanation of these problems.

When I put it all together in one place I was surprised by how bad it looks, because you can be aware of these atomic problems individually. You can be aware that half of all trials have never been published, and trials with positive results are twice as likely to get published as negative ones. You can be aware that sometimes there are these design flaws, you can be aware that there are problems in the way that evidence is disseminated to doctors, you can be aware that there are shortcomings around access to data that regulators have. But actually, when you put it all together in one place, you start to see how they all reinforce each other in this interlocking ecosystem of problems that add up and create quite a worrying overall picture.

I'm surprised that people haven't made more of a fuss about the overall picture. All of things we talk about individually, they've all been discussed mostly behind closed doors, in the sense of academic journals, and in quite technical language. But I think putting it all together in one place makes it feel more unnerving. I was surprised, I think, by how worried I felt at the end.

Kylie: How difficult was it to get Bad Pharma written? What was the publisher’s original response and then going through the process of writing and realizing the eventual size of the book—how did it make you feel?

Ben: Initially, I thought it was going to be a very short book!

Kylie: Yes, big surprise there!

Ben: My intention was: “There's all these problems. They're longstanding. Lots of people know about them. I've got a bit of a platform now because Bad Science has sold half a million copies, so it's a good opportunity to just take these well‑documented problems, put them all in one place, give a good clear explanation of them, and then crack on and write about something else.” It was only when I started to write it that I realized, first, you get that obsessive thing of making sure you've covered all the bases. Recently, I went out with Nassim Taleb, who wrote The Black Swan, and he said, “I read your book, and it reads like it's written by the most paranoid man in the world.”

I was quite surprised: “You mean it's like a loony conspiracy theory?” He said, “No, no. It's written paranoid, because every single step of the way you try to anticipate anything that anyone will say in response to it and head it off. You do that so obsessively to make it watertight, you look paranoid about wanting to stop people from being able to dismiss what it is you're saying.”

I think that's partly why it ended up being 400 pages, because you want to leave no stone unturned, and you want to close off all the exits. People will try and say, “Oh, well, trial results don't get published but it's okay, because regulators will get them.” So then you have to talk about what the problems are with regulators. Then at the same time, I have a day job to consider. I'm working on a project to see if we can find new ways of getting clinical trials to run seamlessly and unobtrusively in routine clinical care using an HS electronic health records with the idea that we can make trials cheaper and get better at collecting good quality data about which drugs work best from representative patients; that takes up a good deal of my time.

So then because I was obsessing over all of that, I found myself wanting more and more to weave in stuff about not just the shortcomings in medicine's failure to achieve its own current stated objectives, but also how we could better achieve what we want to achieve.

Kylie: Although you said that it may come across as paranoid in terms of checking every base, I thought that was really useful, because it demonstrated that this isn't conspiratorial thinking—you are demonstrating evidence for all of the flaws and the issues.

Ben: Yes, and it's not a loony quack book! It's another reason why I wanted to write it; it’s very disappointing to me how in mainstream popular culture, especially in the UK, critiques of the pharmaceutical industry are very unsophisticated.

First, it's always about individual drugs rather than about systems failures. People want there to be a killer drug and a specific person who is killed by said drug. It's much more difficult to get people in mainstream media to talk about the idea that we've got flawed information for evidence‑based medicine, which means that we end up prescribing drugs which will save six out of twenty lives when we could save eight out of twenty lives. There are two deaths more than you should have, but you can't identify who they were, and you can't say that a drug killed them in the sense that it did them more harm than good.

It's more that the flawed processes of evidence‑based medicine means that people were deprived of a better treatment at the same cost, and so two people have died unnecessarily, and that's quite a hard sell. But those are two very real deaths—and I think part of the real challenge of talking about flaws in evidence‑based medicine is that if you kill someone with your own hands, if you strangle them for instance, it's very obvious that you've killed them. If you killed them being an incompetent doctor in terms of your management of that patient right there and then by the standards of consensus or evidence, then it's very obvious that you've just killed somebody.

But if you are a thoughtless participant in a wider system that produces and disseminates flawed evidence in a way that somebody dies unnecessarily, it's harder to pin that on someone. Columbo doesn't come around wearing his trench coat and turn around and go, “Just one more thing,” before he delivers the killing blow that explains why it's all your fault.

Also, it's not one person's fault. It's the fault of a whole system, and also I think that is part of the reason why people feel okay about doing these things—which when you read the book seems completely morally reprehensible, stuff like withholding data, running flawed trials, or disseminating distorted pictures of the evidence. One of the reasons why people feel okay with doing that stuff is pretty much everything we do in medicine actually does more good than harm.

The problem is if you've got one treatment that can save six lives and one treatment that can save eight lives, and you end up getting people to use the one that saves six lives, well, you could go, “Hey, I've just saved six lives. Look at me. I'm fantastic. Look at my fantastic drug. Our marketing department has successfully got lots of people to adopt this drug which saves six lives out of 100,” and fails to recognize in doing so you've deprived people of the opportunity to use the drug that would have saved eight lives out of 100. You did that by distorting the evidence. You've cost society two lives. You've killed two real people, but at the same time you've saved six people. I think that's how people let themselves off the hook.

And so, that all sounds very “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”—but I teach evidence‑based medicine and epidemiology to students. I feel like I have the same battle with them that I do with the readers of this book, which is to try and communicate to people that forest plots and meta‑analysis are not abstract, academic stuff. They relate real world stories of flesh and blood and suffering and pain and bereavement and tears and loss and someone's mum or dad or daughter dying. You have to keep reminding yourself that there is this connection between the abstract world of evidence and the very concrete world of flesh and blood when you're teaching epidemiology but also when you're talking about flaws in evidence‑based medicine to a general audience.

Kylie: Are the systems and incentives so ingrained that essentially the industries are irreversibly flawed? Is there any way to change things?

Ben: Yes, the book is absolutely stuffed full of very simple, very straightforward policy changes that would fix many of the problems that I describe. Actually, the real tragedy of this whole story is how easy this stuff would be to fix. There's absolutely no reason why you should be able to hide the results of clinical trials for drugs that are currently used. There's absolutely no reason why you should be allowed to switch their primary outcome in a trial between the protocol being registered and the paper being published. There's no excuse for any of this stuff and it would be very easy to fix.

Of course, an exciting thing that's happened recently is the www.AllTrials.net campaign, which is amazing, really. So you know I feel much more optimistic now.

Kylie: It looks like a great step in the right direction when it comes to informing stakeholders about clinical trials. What's been the response?

Ben: Well, it's been very positive so far. We've certainly collected a lot of signatures given that we've really only existed on Twitter. We've got thousands and thousands of signatures. People have very kindly donated to cover some of our lobbying costs. Our first big story is that we've collected a number of patients who've participated in trials, a huge list of signatories, saying, “We are patients who participated in clinical trials and are doing something to help inform medical practice. We're appalled to discover that half of the trials for treatments currently in use have never been published, and many of them are completely, deliberately withheld from doctors and patients who need that information to make decisions. We want to know what you're going to do about it.”

I think that's incredibly powerful. Because it is a ludicrous betrayal, really, of what patients expect when they participate in a clinical trial. To discover, actually, if the results are unflattering to a company they might just bury the results and hide them. To discover that if the results are unattractive to an academic, that they're just going to go, “Oh, those don’t support my favorite hypothesis, I'm just going to bury them.”

That's truly appalling. Just as appalling, really, as the idea that if a researcher says, “I'm just not very interested in that anymore, I'm going to go and do another job now. I'm not going to bother writing it up.” I think that's also a serious betrayal of patients.

Kylie: Anyone in the world can sign onto AllTrials.net and lend their support, can't they?

Ben: Yeah, absolutely, at www.AllTrials.net. Also, if you're an academic or a doctor, you should give evidence to the Select Committee. The House of Commons Parliamentary Science and Technology Select Committee in the UK Parliament announced a couple of weeks ago—it's up on www.badscience.net—that they're going to hold a special inquiry into drug companies and researchers withholding the results of clinical trials from doctors and patients.

If you are an academic or a doctor and you're affected by this, or if you're a patient, then it would be really valuable to present evidence to that. If you're a patient organization, anyone who's involved in or affected by this issue, it's really important people give evidence to that Select Committee inquiry, because that's how the government knows that people are taking this seriously.

On January 23, the Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients delivered a birthday present to Houston cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski and the Burzynski Clinic: a donation of around $13,000 raised in his name to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital – with a request that the clinic match those funds for the hospital.

While the effort was initially to raise $30,000 (which happens to be as much money as it takes to enter a clinical trial of antineoplaston treatment at the Burzynski Clinic) every dollar helps and the site will continue to accept donations. I spoke to Bob Blaskiewicz and David Gorski about the fundraiser, and why the Burzynski clinic is such a concern.

Dr. David Gorski writes at Science Blogs as “Orac” for Respectful Insolence and at Science Based Medicine. He is an oncologist, cancer researcher, and patient advocate, and has written extensively about Burzynski.

Dr. Robert (Bob) Blaskiewicz is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he teaches courses in writing and twentieth-century American literature. He specializes in World War II veterans’ writings, extraordinary/paranormal claims and conspiracy theory. He co-edits the blog Skeptical Humanities.

Kylie Sturgess: My first question is, why this joint fundraiser/awareness raising? Isn't it the job of the government to regulate medical claims or consumers to “buyer beware”? Why this particular approach?

Bob Blaskiewicz: What I'd really like to see happen is to turn a situation that is really quite bad into something positive. The magnitude of suffering that we see at the Burzynski clinic. It's something that I haven't really seen before. Since I've started following this issue, since about a year ago when Rhys Morgan and the other bloggers were threatened by people who'd been hired by Burzynski, my interest has only grown. I think that the best thing that we can do is put our money where our mouth is and support good science, while drawing attention to what's going on at the Burzynski clinic.

Kylie: David, Bob summed it up as “really quite bad.” I think the claims go far beyond that! You've been blogging about Burzynski for some time—what’s your take on his claims?

David Gorski: There are so many of them that it's hard to know where to start! There are two main things that he does. The first dates back more than thirty years, and that's the antineoplastons.

Basically, back in the 1970s or so, maybe even earlier, Burzynski claimed to have discovered endogenous compounds in the body, made by the body, that inhibit cancer. That's not really a new idea; there are such compounds, I used to study one back in the 90s.

The problem is, he never had the evidence to demonstrate that what he claimed were these compounds, which he dubbed antineoplastons, actually did what he claimed they would do. He has some in vitro data that suggests that they might have some activity against some cancers. But when it really came down to it, in human trials, Burzynski is yet to produce human trials that are convincing evidence that these compounds do what he claims that they do.

The second angle is what he calls “personalized gene targeted cancer therapy,” which is a recent development. This is basically him jumping on the bandwagon of personalised medicine by sending patient samples out to this commercial lab; I blogged about that about a year ago.

But, in any case, he's basically doing personalized therapy incompetently. What worries me about this is that he could very well besmirch the name of personalized therapy while it's still in its infancy and hasn't really been shown to reach its full potential—that we all hope and think that it probably will reach. He also charges a ton of money for what he’s doing.

The other thing that patients don't understand is he uses a lot of chemotherapy, even though he claims to be using natural, non‑toxic methods.

Bob: I haven't heard much from the man himself. I hear a lot more from his patients parroting apparently what they've heard at the clinic that it's non‑toxic. But when it comes to selling it, his most ardent promoters are people who have survived his treatment. I'm sure they're completely sincere in that, but we just don't have the evidence that separates the background noise, the spontaneous remission, or the misdiagnosis from the actual effect of these drugs. And so, he just doesn't really have grounds to charge that much.

If he has a cure for these childhood brain tumors, he may well have earned his $30,000 a pop or more. The treatment often runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But, so far, he just hasn't produced the evidence to convince specialists that he's doing something useful.

Kylie: Why is he getting away with it?

David: Well, Kylie, that's where I was about to jump in, because the one thing that he does that burns me, as a cancer doctor and a researcher, is that he charges patients to be on his clinical trials. There are rare exceptions, and he's not one of them, but it's generally considered highly unethical to charge patients to be part of a clinical trial. Pharmaceutical companies don't even do that. If they did, people would be totally up in arms, but he charges patients to be in his clinical trials.

Now he's had since the mid‑90s about sixty some odd clinical trials, most of them Phase II, which is one of the more preliminary ones. He never really publishes in any decent journals the results of these clinical trials, but he apparently kept enrolling patients on them. It just drives me crazy, and I can't figure out how he does it, or how the FDA keeps letting him do it, but he does.

Bob: This will be something that the newly‑formed group, the Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients, is going to investigate.

David: IRB in the U.S. stands for Institutional Review Board. All human subject research in the United States that is funded by the federal government has to abide by the Common Rule, which is a set of regulations governing human subjects’ protection administered by the Department of Health and Human Services. Not all research has to abide by the Common Rule, but most of it ends up having to. Anything funded by the federal government—that’s a no‑brainer. Anything done at a university that's funded by the federal government generally, or that receives federal funding falls under that. Any research being done to obtain FDA approval for a treatment, or a drug, or a device has to abide by the Common Rule, so that's the deal there.

He has his own IRB. The head of his IRB is a crony of his, someone who works for his clinic. These IRBs are supposed to be somewhat independent, and at universities, they are. Even though they are part of the university and made up of faculty and various people, they're very much kept off to the side, so that the university or individual researchers can't pressure it.

But Burzynski basically has people who work for him, as far as I can tell, in his IRB. It reminds me a lot of Mark and David Geier, the anti‑vaccine guys who basically did the same thing when they were trying to do clinical trials of their use of Lupron in autism.

Kylie: Fascinating. I guess that immediately leads on to my next question which I'll aim to you, Bob. What we're talking about here is people. When David's talking about clinical trials, we're talking about people who are putting their trust into these claims that Burzynski is making. What are some of the big cases that you've encountered, ones that you've documented?

Bob: This poor kid, Chase S., was in a coma for a long time. He steadily declined once he was on the ANP, and his parents were devoted to an alternative medical regime, fussing over the minutiae of diet. Meanwhile, this kid is just losing more and more functionality, and then he's basically lying in state in his parents’ living room for months. Even after he was no longer able to communicate, they're bringing in “intuitives” to talk to him, much like facilitated communication. You really had a sense that these parents just had a really hard time accepting the reality of the situation.

These people are extremely vulnerable. In some ways, it seems to me that some of these patients are almost determined to encounter every mystic, and faith healer, and quack. But that means the system needs to be better to help catch them before they end up in those people's clutches.

I've come across so many patients who have gone into the clinic with high hopes, and they always get that, “We think that there is a chance that we can do something.” For someone with a brain stem tumor, that's the first good news that they've had in their entire treatment. They latch onto that.

Over and over, we see symptoms that really look like they're getting worse being interpreted by the clinic and reported by the patients as something like a healing crisis, or they're getting well so fast it's hurting them. There's something about that strikes me as not right, especially when we see the outcome.

Kylie: I guess my next question is for David then. Are these so‑called cures growing in popularity? Has it become a big concern not just to the medical establishment but everyone in general? Are you getting more and more people saying, “I'm turning away and going to these alternative practitioners because I can't see medicine providing me with any hope?”

David: There have always been these sorts of things. You go back to the 1970s and 80s, you had Laetrile and various other alternative treatments. Just over the border from San Diego, in Tijuana, there are all sorts of alternative medicine clinics that cater to Americans. They've been there a long time. They're still there. The question is whether we're just hearing more about it because of the power of the Internet, or whether it's easier for patients to find out about them, or hear about them.

There's a group of Burzynski patients – Bob knows more about this than I do – that have this online community. They're very web savvy. They know how to get positive news and anecdotes and stuff about Burzynski high in the Google rankings. They suck patients in and they're true believers.

Bob: The Burzynski patient group is... I don't think they're intentionally deceptive, like you said—they offer powerful testimonials. There's a reason why testimonials are constantly repeated in churches, for example, about conversion and salvation. You get a very similar type of thing going on in the Burzynski patient group. It strikes me as cult‑y.

David: It's a lot cult‑y!

Bob: Cults thrive on dependence. The people there are dependent on an authority figure. These people are totally dependent on Burzynski. They think he has the only thing that will save them.

David: There's definitely a cult of personality about him!

Bob: The other thing that has been, I hate to say it, but an effective recruiting piece has been Eric Merola's movie, “Burzynski,” where cancer is a serious business. He doesn't appreciate the irony of that name.

David: No, and I didn't realize that movie was really that effective. I watched it and reviewed it a year, year and a half ago, and I couldn't believe how blatant it was. It was badly made. The narrator had this creepy, electronic undertone to it. It was low‑quality mp3 or something. It was so blatantly one‑sided that I can't believe anyone would believe this stuff, but people do—and he's making a new one!

Bob: You see it on Twitter hashtag. When you look at the number of hits, in the hundreds of thousands, they've reached a lot of people. A lot of people who firmly that there are forces conspiring against them and meaning to keep people sick with cancer because it's so profitable. What they don't seem to realize is that cancer, it's a disease that is eventually going to catch up with everybody. Whoever comes up with treatments will be able to save the lives of the people who are supposed to be guarding the cure.

David: There's something that drives me crazy too, the conspiracy theories. I've written about this before—think about it: cancer scientists, doctors, oncologists. Cancer is not just one disease, it's hundreds of diseases, so it's really, really hard. In fact, individual cancers are arguably hundreds of diseases, because cancer masses are heterogeneous. The cells in one part could be very different from the cells in another part.

But I digress. Think of it this way... Do you know people who had cancer? Do you have close relatives or friends who have come down with cancer or died of cancer? Almost everybody has. If you're above the age of about forty, it's got to approach 100 percent. Can you believe that all these scientists would be keeping this secret if they thought that they could use it to save their relatives who might have come down with cancer?

Think of the hundreds of thousands of people who would have to all keep this secret. It's ridiculous. Then, of course, this small band knows about it. It must be the most incompetent conspiracy ever.

Kylie: Of course, all of this revolves around the power of the Internet. Burzynski’s patients have been using the power of the Internet to promote him and downplay critics. Now, you've got a fundraiser that you've been organizing. What's the goal? What's going to be happening with this fundraiser?

Bob: What we're trying to do is raise $30,000, the cost of starting treatment. At least the most recent quote that I've seen for starting his antineoplaston treatment. Raise that money in honor of Stan's seventieth birthday. What do you get the cancer quack who has everything? So, we're going to try to raise this money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which does fantastic work, and who helped a friend of mine when he was sick.

It seems like the most effective thing will ultimately be legislative reform, to protect subjects of cancer drug trials. But, in the short term, we want to raise $30,000 by his birthday, donate it to St. Jude in his name. And then, on his birthday, issue a challenge to the clinic to match what skeptics raise, regardless of whether or not he decides to participate. I have a feeling it's hard to shame the shameless. But regardless of whether or not he participates, we'll be able to say it's probably the best thing ever done in his name for cancer research.

David: Also, St. Jude's is an incredible cause; basically, no patient ever pays anything at St. Jude's. Regardless of Obamacare or whatever, right now, in this country, we do not have universal health care like most other countries in the developed world do. So having a place where children with cancer can go, where their families don't have to pay anything is huge in this country. Hopefully, if we get to the point where we have more of a universal health care, then more of that money could go to research, instead of paying for patients who don't have insurance.

We want to help people who are really fighting the good fight, do what they can do.

You can find out more about the challenge at the Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients.

Her published research has spanned various topics, including clinical psychological assessment, the neuropsychology of blindness, neuronal cell culture techniques, and computational neurophysiology. She has appeared on Larry King Live (CNN), Parker/Spitzer (CNN), Geraldo at Large (Fox News), and I Kid (TLC). She also co-produced and hosted a science talk show pilot for HBO.

Kylie Sturgess: How did your interest in science begin? What were some of your early influences?

Cara Santa Maria: It's funny, because when I was really, really young, I was obsessed with dinosaurs, and I would try to dig up dinosaur bones in my backyard. As a kindergartner, I was sure that I was going to grow up to become a paleontologist.

Cut to high school, when I was scared out of my mind of science and avoided science like the plague, and I don't think that I was really well-prepared for that dream. I found out later that you have to study rocks and dirt and all sorts of things that I didn't care about.

So I ended up actually studying psychology in college, after making a switch from vocal jazz performance—a random, winding road! It wasn't until I got really into psychology that I realized how fascinating the brain part of the equation, and the brain-behavior relationship, was. So I decided to stick around after I got my undergrad and study biology—specifically neuroscience—for my master's degree.

Kylie: So how did that lead into journalism, and then into communicating science?

Cara: It happened so randomly! It's kind of that “a door closes, a window opens” situation. And that's something that I always try to tell kids, too, when I have talks with them or when I can get involved in the community: don't expect that exactly what you think is going to happen is going to work out, and be open to the twists and turns because sometimes they lead you to places you never would've thought you'd go.

I was actually in New York, working on a PhD in clinical neuropsychology, and I was miserable. I had moved from Texas. It was a great program and the people were great, but New York was not for me. I was sad and lonely and really cold. And at the same time, I had started dating somebody who lived out in Los Angeles—I would go visit and come back home and come visit and go back home.

And eventually, I think the relationship started to take over, and I thought that it was really important to try and put my stock into that. So I moved out to Los Angeles. I left my program, moved to Los Angeles, and had no idea what I was going to do!

I was out here for a while, and through a bunch of random flukes and twists and turns, ended up doing a couple things on-air; ended up basically being able to expand the classroom. I had always loved teaching a little more than I liked doing the bench-work anyway. I had a great opportunity to be on “Larry King.” I got some bigger breaks, and then I was able to put together a pilot for HBO. That didn't end up going anywhere, but I think it got me some of the exposure that I needed.

So eventually, Arianna Huffington actually came to me and said, “We don't have a science page. That's crazy. We need a science page, and I want your help putting it together.” So that's how I got started as a science correspondent at The Huffington Post.

Kylie: So what's it like at The Huffington Post? Whenever I mention it to people, if I recommend a link or a site, I get a massive range of reactions, from, “Oh, they're just gossip columnists promoting this, that, and the other,” to “Oh yeah, they've got great articles.” How do people generally respond?

Cara: First of all, it's a great place to work. I have so many amazing colleagues, and also some really good friends that I've made from being here. And it's interesting, because it's kind of split up all over the country. There's a huge newsroom in New York. I'm out here in Beverly Hills, and it's a much smaller newsroom. So we don't quite get the energy of the New York newsroom, but at the same time, we get to have fun pool parties and go to the beach! They've actually got beer on-tap in the kitchen.

Kylie: That sounds very Australian!

Cara: Does it? Oh, awesome! But when it comes to the actual way that The Huffington Post works, I can't really speak to a lot of that because I came in so late in the game. From what I gather, HuffPost actually started as a blog site. So it was just a community of a lot of people who were educated and informed but also very opinionated, and they would write blogs and people could go there to read different stories from a lot of different perspectives.

Obviously, politics is a really big vertical in terms of topics, but it is so broad at Huffington Post. You can go there to read about celebrity gossip if you want. You can go there to read hard-hitting political stories. We have some amazing White House correspondents and some amazing political reporters. You can go there to read about your interests. We've got these great voices; Latino voices, black voices, gay voices. You can really go and find your interest and get involved in the community.

So, I focus on science. I can't speak to what shows up on other pages, but on science, we try to make it really solid, really evidence-based, and also kind of fun, a place for nerds to come and hang out and read what's going on in the world of science.

Kylie: How did the video series “Talk Nerdy to Me” happen? Why video, in particular?

Cara: It's kind of strange! When I first started here I was kind of rudderless, I guess you could say, because we hadn't launched the science page. I started about three months before it launched. So I was involved in the launch process, but we didn't have an editor and were still trying to come up with the direction. Arianna Huffington had seen me do some on-air work, and actually, when I had done the pilot for HBO, we had called that pilot “Talk Nerdy to Me.” It kind of sparked the idea of doing this video series online. I think that maybe the pilot was a little edgy. It was a little new. It felt very new-media, on a more traditional format. So I think to be able to translate that into a new-media Internet format just made perfect sense.

So when I first started here, I did some video and some not quite long-form writing, more medium-form writing. And I played around with infographics and doing a lot of fun and different ways to present scientific stories. I think that video is my medium. It's fun for me to be able to go in front of the camera. When you can add visual components to a story, they come alive in a way that they don't always come alive just on the page, with words.

And also, now that HuffPost Live has launched, which is this great online streaming network, I have the opportunity to go downstairs to the studios and check in with the HuffPost Live hosts at least a few times a week and be a little more off-the-cuff and talk about all of the interesting news of the day in science.

Kylie: Speaking of the interesting news, sometimes it's controversial news. Do you ever get pushback due to content? You've covered global warming, homeopathy; I love the one where you said, “I'm an atheist, and I went on ‘The Young Turks’ to talk about it”! How do people respond to the controversy? How do you respond when people complain?

Cara: It's funny. The places where people can complain are aplenty online. So they can go into the comments section and speak their minds, and I always encourage them to do so, and I try to get involved there. They can go on Facebook and Twitter; I encourage them to do that as well.

Also, when my pieces end up going on YouTube, especially if I do work for “The Young Turks,” for “The Point,” which is separate from HuffPost, I see a lot of comments. Obviously the YouTube comments are just the most colorful in all of the Internet. And I have a forward-facing email that people find, and they can send me responses there.

A lot of times, I get very positive feedback. I get feedback from people saying, “My kids watch your show, and they were able to bring it into the classroom,” or from people saying, “Man, I think a lot like you, and it's really cool to find somebody out there who's outspoken about their atheism or who thinks that science is cool, who rocks the geek label without fear.” But I also do get some backlash. I get vitriol a lot of the times. I get a lot of hate mail. I think my favorite one said that I was the Antichrist himself.

Kylie: Gosh. Wow.

Cara: It's actually a long, intense, fun email! I keep it around, just for giggles, whenever I need a pick-me-up. But for the most part, I take it with a grain of salt, because I know that some of the things that I talk about, though they're not scientifically controversial, can be taken as politically or, more often, religiously controversial, and it cuts to the core of people's sensitivities. Sometimes I like to take a no-apologies approach. Other times I think that it is important that I be a little softer in my approach. I think it really varies, depending on what the topic is and depending on who I think my audience is going to be.

The big thing that I've learned, though, being online and being really out there, is that you have to be yourself. The truth of the matter is, with me, what you see is what you get. I'm a terrible actress. I'm not a good liar. So when I'm on the air, you are seeing Cara Santa Maria: 100 percent, the same as I am with my friends.

The biggest thing that I've realized is going into the comments takes a certain amount of fortitude. It takes a certain amount of strength. And so, there are days when I'm not up for it, and I have to avoid them on those days. There are other days when my sense of humor is where it needs to be, when I'm feeling good about myself, when I'm feeling productive, when I'm having a good day, and I can go in and I can take the good with the bad. But if I know I'm going to be sensitive or take something too personally, or take something the wrong way, I just avoid the comments section that day, and I think that that's the healthiest approach.

Kylie: One of the things that can sometimes overwhelm women online is the backlash from men, or sexist attitudes in general—which can come from both men and women. How do you respond to the imbalance of men and women in science? I mean, take yourself for example: you worked in research, and now you're working in journalism. You're putting yourself out there in terms of communicating science. Do you think that this is a good way for scientists, especially women in science, to go forth and be a role model, as it were?

Cara: I think that there are so many more men in science, naturally. But also, I think, when it comes to the general public, it's funny because I kind of have a built-in audience of middle-aged men. Middle-aged men are generally more interested in the sciences. That's the demographic Discover and National Geographic are trying to reach out to. But I know that there are a lot of young women, a lot of younger men, a lot of kids, and a lot of minorities that are interested in science. I try to tap into those groups—not in any sort of targeted marketing way, but just because I am one of those groups. I'm a young Latina woman, and I know that there are other people like me out there. The first thing that I try to do is not be exclusionary.

But speaking to what you were asking about sexism or about misogyny; that happens. It really happens, and I think that it takes all types. Women are not monolithic, and even female science communicators are not monolithic. Some women want to be, I think, a little more anonymous. They want to keep the work very heavily focused on the work.

Obviously, I have a face to the name. Obviously, the title of my series is “Talk Nerdy to Me.” It's already tongue-in-cheek. I take the attitudes that can come along with it with a grain of salt. As a general rule, on my Facebook, for example, I respond to almost everybody. I get emails on my Facebook fan page all the time, and I really like to take the time to respond to everybody.

But when I get an email that's just an overtly sexual email or it's asking me on a date or something like that, my silence is my response. I don't engage that kind of behavior. What ends up happening is that on my Facebook page it falls away, because people realize that it’s falling on deaf ears.

But if they want to have a really in-depth conversation with me, if you want to really talk about the last piece that I made, talk about the piece that I made. If you want to talk about the way I look in my T-shirt? I'm not going to talk back to you.

I think it's hard for a lot of women, because sometimes men, I think, think that they're complimenting when they could be saying something that's offensive. For me, I try to figure out intent. I try not to lump all, I guess you could say parenthetical comments together and say, “Oh, that's misogyny and I'm not going to stand for that!”

The truth is, if somebody says, “Wow, I find you beautiful and you're smart, too! That's amazing!” Obviously, I think to a lot of women they'd be like, “Oh my God, dude, are you serious?” But I think you can sometimes tell when the guy really honestly thinks that he's trying to compliment you.

Kylie: How do you avoid false equivalencies when doing science reporting? What sort of resources do you lean upon?

Cara: That's a really good question. Honestly, it's tough. For me, that's one of the most important things that I do in my day-to-day; I don't stand for false equivalencies. I try really hard not to make those errors myself. When it comes to science, oftentimes there's a right answer and a wrong answer. Sometimes we don't know. But when we talk about this side of the argument or that side of the argument, a lot of times what we're actually talking about is science and anti-science, non-science, junk science, or pseudoscience.

And it's very difficult for the casual reader of science to be able to tell the difference, because that's the tricky and intelligent thing about pseudoscience peddlers. That's why we call it pseudoscience, it sounds like science. It uses the same words. You can trick people that way, when a lot of times what we're really looking at is self help books or quack medical things, alternatives to try and make money off of an unsuspecting public.

I'm actually really into the whole debunking side of things. I like to read strong skeptic magazines. I read Skeptic. I read Skeptical Inquirer. I'm really interested in reading things I hear about on “Point of Inquiry.” A lot of times, that will give me ideas for new stories. I like to figure out what seems mainstream but is actually totally bunk.

If I can do a story about that and inform just a few more people, then that's fine. Sometimes it's heavy, and sometimes it's really tongue-in-cheek. I did a piece about whether or not redheads are really going extinct, because this kind of meme has been on the Internet for years. There are so many articles about it. And genetics doesn't work that way. This recessive trait is not going to be bred out of the population. Don't worry, redheads, you're not going extinct!

Kylie: What advice would you have for someone who's hoping to follow in your footsteps? Do you think the milieu is going to change dramatically over the next five years for science writers and for communicators out there?

Cara: One thing that I like to tell people who are in high school, in college—when you're looking through the course guide, if a class sounds interesting to you, take it. Take interesting classes and you can figure out what that means for your future as you go along.

For me, if I had studied straight journalism I might not have been exposed to the science that I wanted to be exposed to. I'm starting to notice a lot of people—if your school doesn't offer a multidisciplinary or an interdisciplinary program, make it yourself. If you really like chemistry and dance, take chemistry and dance and figure out how to make those things work for you.

If you specifically are interested in science communication, I definitely recommend taking all the science classes that you can, taking math, taking statistics. But also taking writing classes, and I don't just mean journalism. Take literature. Take poetry.

On top of that, try and become knowledgeable about the political landscape in your country. Try and become knowledgeable about the history and the civics of your country. Because I think all of those things end up coming into play.

Psychology is important, too. Understanding how the reader or how the viewer is going to perceive science, understanding some of the nuances in science denialism that's out there and figuring out how to be able to get in the heads of the reader and really communicate to people are both very important.

One thing that I hope that I can do, one thing that I always try to do, is follow in the footsteps of my personal hero, Carl Sagan. Because I think that he managed to communicate science in a way that showed how incredibly human, how incredibly emotional, and how incredibly poetic science really is. I'd like to see more of that out there, because I think that it will inspire more people to become scientifically literate and to think scientifically about the world.

Talk Nerdy to Me can be found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/talk-nerdy-to-me.

Recently I've been writing and podcasting about Christmas (well, it is the season) and after documenting a suggested list of books to encourage young critical thinkers, I began to think about other kinds of gifts.

You may have heard that research indicates that life-experience purchases trump items when it comes to long-term satisfaction. To me, nothing indicates that more than having the kids imagine a rocket out of the box that the expensive gift came in, rather than enjoying the latest Apple product it once contained. In an effort to learn more about providing fun science adventures, I interviewed one of my favourite scientists, Laurie Tarr, about how she provides opportunities to explore science concepts in fun ways.

Laurie Tarr is a stay-at-home mom with two kids. She has a B.S. in physics from Centre College and works part-time as a science educator for Mad Science of Kentucky. Along with her husband Rob, she founded the Louisville Area Skeptics in 2009, where she organizes Louisville Science Café, a monthly science outreach program for the public.

She also organizes Born to Do Science Kentuckiana, a monthly science outreach program for children in the Kentucky and Southern Indiana area.

Kylie Sturgess: What are some of the challenges you've faced when it comes to communicating science to kids? I mean, I know that people go around saying kids are “natural scientists.” Is it more complicated than that?

Laurie Tarr: I think it is more complicated than that. I think kids need to have a foundation. They need to have a vocabulary, and the best way to do that is to read to kids from the time they're born.

But some kids that I teach, especially the inner city kids, I might use words that they've never heard before even though I am trying very consciously to use simplified terms and not use a lot of jargon. They still, I will say things and they won't know what I mean. And that is the big challenge.

I remember teaching to a group of kindergartners when my son was in kindergarten, and I was asking them, “How come you stand on the ground and you don't float around the room?” And they come up with things like "my shoes are sticky..." and other answers like that. Finally, I asked them if they'd ever heard of the word "gravity.” And half of them said no.

So it's sort of hard to remember that the kids don't always have the vocabulary and all of the words that we're used to using on an everyday basis, that this stuff really is new to them. They are "born scientists" in that they want to know; they question everything. They are constantly testing things—even babies do this. Everything, they pick it up and they put it in their mouths because they want to know why this one is different than that one! But they don't have the foundation in that they don't have the words, the terms. They don't have any of the maths. And so in some ways, it easier to teach older fourth grade, fifth grade, and sixth grade kids because they have all of the basics already. But the really little ones, you really have to introduce things as if it's new every single time.

Kylie: So what do you find works well when you're teaching science? Is there anything that has surprised you?

Laurie: Things that work well include saying things, then doing them, and then letting the kids do them, and then saying it again. Usually it's that second or even third time that I say it that sometimes a light bulb will go on, but the kids like to see it and they like to try it themselves.

And even after they done that, they still don't always get it. They might even be surprised that it happens the same way the second time. But things that really work with kids aren't just talking to them. The college professor at the lectern, with the chalkboard? That's not going to go over so great with little kids. They really want to see things. They want to try things. They want to touch things. I even have to constantly tell them, "Don't eat this. This isn't food!" They want to taste and smell and kids like to get their hands dirty, so that usually helps a lot.

Kylie: I agree about tasting. When I got my thesis, I was so happy with it all bound and everything that I hugged it and I smelled it and I tasted it. It was just joyful - "This is all mine!" So I'm perfectly okay with kids having a try too!

Kylie: Do we have to go out and buy the latest scientific gadgets to get kids engaged? When I was out shopping, I’d been trying to write a blog post in regards to things that you could do to encourage your kids in science. And books, I’m OK with. Books, I know. I can go down to the bookstore and ask the booksellers, or talk to Embiggen Books and say “Hey, what’s out there for kids?”

But I went down to my local store and saw that the biggest seller was Make Your Own Combustion engine, and I thought it was huge—in physical size. And I was thinking: “Jeez, really?” And I thought about how many parents are just going be spending all of Boxing Day putting this thing together and the kids are just playing with the box. Or playing with the iPad instead because who cares? It’s just a combustion engine.

Laurie: Yeah. No, I don’t think you need to go out and buy all of the science kits, and you can if you’d like! That’s fine! But I think that there is science in everything we do. There is science in the world all around us. And I tell kids that. When I’m teaching them, I’ll say, “Okay, today we’re going to do art,” and they say, “Oh, I thought we were going to do science?” And I say “But science is in art,” and they say “What??” And that’s where I try to explain that science is in everything.

I say “Think of anything, talk to me about it, and I can tell you the science in it.” And that’s something that’s kids don’t always realise, and I think maybe that’s something that grownups don’t always realise – that science is not a separate topic. Science is everything everywhere. And so you can go in the kitchen and cooking is science. And you can make concoctions in the kitchen… you know, that whole Mentos and Diet Coke thing, that’s science. And you can have science in the bathtub, you can make waves and splashing and all sorts of different things.

You can have science out in the yard. There’s physics in bouncing a ball and there’s physics in riding a bike. There’s science, there’s physics, there’s chemistry, there’s biology everywhere around us all the time, and I think the hardest thing is just to be conscious of that and to point it out. I can do an entire hour’s lecture science class on the science of balloons.

I have easily twenty-five different things that I can do with balloons that have to do with science. And it doesn’t take a lot of fancy equipment, and it doesn’t take PhD. It’s just me and some balloons and a few other gadgets, and me and the kids have a great time! And they learn physics and they learn chemistry and they learn action and reaction and they learn electrostatics and they learn all sorts of things.

One source of great stuff like this is YouTube. YouTube is just amazing – there is no science that you can think of that you can’t search on YouTube and find a video that somebody else has made.

Kylie: What got you into doing this is the first place? I read that you're doing the Born to Do Science program in your town. How did that start and what does it involve?

Laurie: I am friends with a wonderful man named Monty Harper, who I met around four years ago. He is an award winning children's songwriter and he has many CDs, including children's music, and some of it's just fun and some of it is educational. He's got a whole series of music about libraries and reading that he did for the library program.

He has a CD called "Songs from the Science Frontier" which are based on real scientists and their actual research. He hosted monthly science café type events at his local library during the day on a Saturday and he had fourth, fifth, and sixth grade children come. He invited a real scientist to come and talk about their research.

And he had the scientist not just talk about generic science. Not just, "Here's what biology is," or "Here's what frogs do," or whatever. He actually had them talk about their actual research and Monty managed to bring it down to a level that the kids understood. And then Monty went home and wrote songs about each of the scientists and so he has a whole album of songs that aren't just generic science songs—they're specific to these different scientists and their research.

It's such a fun thing; he's been doing it for at least three years now. In the meantime, I have been doing science cafés for adults here in my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. I've been doing it every month, science cafés with different scientists coming to talk to adults—I thought, "If I'm doing this and it's not so hard and it's not so much work, why can't I do this for kids too?"

I did find that finding scientists who are willing to come and talk to kids is a little bit more challenging than finding scientists who will come and talk to grownups! Some of them are intimidated by it! They think that the children won't understand their research or sometimes they're even a little bit scared of interacting with the kids.

I have found very few scientists who have said no to me about coming to science café, but I have had more say no to me about coming to talk to the Born to Do Science kids. I think that's interesting!

Kylie: What do you say to them in order to encourage these scientists? Do you say, "It's okay. They don't bite that much," sort of thing?

Laurie: I have! I have talked several of them into it and I have said, "Look. You deal on a daily basis with college students who don't want to be there. College students who are bored and asleep and obnoxious and who don't want to be in your class and you get through that, right?" And they say, "Yes that's true."

And I say, "These kids only come to this library program because they love science. They're only there because they want to learn science and they want to meet you. They want to hear about your research. So isn't that better? Don't you want an audience like that?"

I had one just last month and she was kind of nervous about it. Right before it started, she was like, "I'm a little nervous!"

I'm saying, "No, no. It's going to be fine," And afterwards the kids had a great time. They asked lots of really intelligent questions. They laughed when they told jokes. All the right things happened and when it was over, I said, "I told you it would be OK!" It all turned out fine and I don't know exactly what the concern is, but it does intimidate them to come and talk to a room full of kids.

It's funny, but we've been having a good time with it for about a year now and we've had lots of scientists come. We've had lots of kids come. I am more proud of that than anything else I've done I think because I'm getting these kids to come and meet real scientists and learn about what it is they really do. Because what you see on TV and movies with the scientists being the crazy guy with the crazy hair and the white lab coat—that's not always true. A lot of these scientists are women and a lot of them are just normal people with normal interests just like everyone else, but they happen to do science every day for a living.

I want these kids to see that and I want them to see that there are lots of options for careers in science. That normal people are scientists and some science is different from others. It's not all the chemistry with the beakers and the glass tubing and all of that that you see TV. So it's been a lot of fun.

Kylie: When it comes it our own children—or in my case my nephews and my niece—I can sort of feel confident that I'm in the same ballpark as they are. We're family. We've got certain shared ideas and values about some things. But when it comes to other people's children, sometimes you might get different beliefs and values—like creationism. How do you risk not coming across as judgmental or having parents complain? For example, teaching groups of girl guides and how sometimes there might be challenges about those kinds of issues.

Laurie: That is true; I am not a public school teacher. I work for a company that goes around and teaches science in different classes. I teach in public schools and I teach in private schools. I'm not always necessarily as mindful of that as I ought to be and so I did teach in a small private Christian school recently and I wasn't thinking about it. I was just teaching science. We were talking about animals and adaptations and I said, "These animals evolved to be this way to have fur and have long sharp claws. We evolved to be hairless except on our heads mostly. We have short soft fingernails." I just threw out some comment like that and didn't even think about it.

Apparently some of the parents did complain about me later and I had to have a talking to. And so I regret that. I did not realise that particular Christian school was a Young Earth Creationism school and a lot of Christian schools do teach evolution and so I didn't realise this particular one did not. So I now know that when I go to that school, I just don't bring up the age of the Earth. I don't bring up creationism or evolution. I just don't bring those topics up and then we get along fine.

My theory on the whole thing is it's not really any of my business what these religion these children are or what they've been taught at home. I just want them to learn some science and to get excited about science and to love science. When they're grownups, they can decide if they're going to be creationists or if they're going to be something else.

It is unfortunate that I can't teach them all of the science. I can't teach them cosmology. I can't teach them that dinosaurs died out sixty-five million years ago. I can't teach them those things at that particular school, but I still feel like I'm doing good by going in and teaching them better science than probably they would have gotten without me.

If it ever comes up in my classes…I was talking about magic one day and I said, "Do I have real Harry Potter magic?"

And they said, "No."

And I said, "No one does."

And the kids said, "Well, except Jesus,"

I just sort of let that go and went on with my topic. If they specifically ask me a question, my answer is probably going to be, "I teach science and science doesn't really have anything to say about religion. If you have questions about religion, you can talk to your pastor. You can talk to your parents, but I'm just here to talk about science."

And so I sort of try to separate the two and I'm trying not to step on anybody's toes because the last thing I want is for them to say, "OK. We're done. We don't want you to ever come to my school and teach science again," because the kids would really miss out then.

Kylie: To finish off, what is your favourite science experiment that you do with kids?

Laurie: There are so many fun ones and there's some that I do that it's just not that much fun to me, but I still try to make it fun. But I have some super favourite ones and probably the most fun I have is when I use dry ice. I can do an entire hour just on dry ice; dry ice and soap bubbles, dry ice and balloons, dry ice and bottles with corks on them, dry ice and just about everything.

It's kind of dangerous—you can burn yourself with dry ice, so you've got to be careful with it! Look it up on YouTube to learn how to do it safely, but there's so much fun to be had with dry ice and you can get a great big chunk of it for five bucks down at the grocery. There's so much fun stuff you can learn with it. I really enjoy it.

Kylie: I'm trying to wonder how I might be able to wrap dry ice and present it to my nephews for Christmas, but that might be a bit difficult…

Laurie: If you wrap it more than about a day before Christmas, they're going to open an empty box!

Kylie: "It was dry ice, kids! Merry Christmas!"

You can find more ideas at Mad Science of Kentucky and listen to Harper’s work at www.montyharper.com.

The interview with Laurie Tarr features at Token Skeptic #147 - On Being Born To Do Science.

I first became interested in the progress of Steiner (or “Waldorf”) schools while doing research for my talk at the World Skeptics Congress in Berlin, on the topic of pseudoscience in education, earlier this year. My reading included not only articles written for the Skeptical Inquirer (“Weird Science at Steiner School,” Fall 1991), but also André Sebastiani’s extensive investigation on anthroposophy, “Versteinerte Erziehung” for the German Skeptiker Magazine, edition 4/2011, (which recommends another 2007 German work, Anthroposophie in Deutschland, by Zander).

In May of this year, a public letter of protest was circulated, signed by the likes of Edzard Ernst, Professor of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter; David Colquhoun, Professor of Pharmacology at University College London and the science writer Simon Singh – it specifically criticized Maharishi and Steiner schools as being “grave threats to science education.”

In an effort to learn more, I have interviewed Andy Lewis of Quackometer, for Episode #137 of the Token Skeptic podcast, after reading his Steiner-focused series of blogposts: “The Insidious Pervasiveness of the Cult of Rudolf Steiner,” “The Bank that likes to say ‘Quack’: Triodos,” “Frome Steiner Academy: Absurd Educational Quackery,” and “Is Biodynamic Farming Vegan?”

Andy Lewis has developed the web site Quackometer.net in order to explore the pseudo-medical claims of alternative medicine web sites and their impact on society, and was previously interviewed on the CSICOP website on the topic of Stanislaw Burzynski.

*****

Kylie Sturgess: Who was Steiner and why should we be concerned about anthroposophy?

Andy Lewis: Rudolph Steiner lived about 100 years or so ago; he was an Austrian who called himself a philosopher. He was a mystic, really. He set about trying to combine his views of science with his views of spiritualism, if you like. He believed you could extend science by directly experiencing the spiritual world. And he came up with something called spiritual science, which evolved into what we now know as anthroposophy.

Why should we be worried about him? That's a good question. Until quite recently, I wasn't worried at all. But then, I realized that people who follow his beliefs and teachings seemed to be cropping up everywhere. And it wasn't clear to me how you could really recognize where his influence was going. When I investigated them a bit, it turned out it's a very esoteric tradition in that the Steinerists really keep their beliefs to themselves—the way they present themselves to the world is quite different from what they believe themselves.

I think they believe—like a lot of these organizations do—that you can't really fully understand the beliefs until you've gone through a journey. That's why their beliefs are not revealed to you immediately. So, when you want to talk about things like Steiner or Waldorf schools, parents aren't really told what they're getting themselves in to.

That alarmed me quite a lot, because I was coming across parents on the web who thought Steiner and Waldorf schools were progressive and child-centered and all those good sounding things. But then, they dug a little bit deeper—because things were a little bit odd—and they felt like they were dealing with a cult.

I think what's worrying about Steiner, and different from some of these other more progressive teaching methods, is the esoteric nature. But it's not really revealed to the teachers and I don’t think they really understand it. But it’s not revealed to the parents, importantly, when they enroll their children.

So, yes, you might liken it to Scientology, I suppose, in that that's another esoteric tradition where, as you pay more money you find out more about it. I think that there are some interesting comparisons there.

Kylie: Now, we're both citizens—we could just not send our children to a Waldorf school. I could choose not to teach at one. Why not live and let live? Why not just say, “OK, that's them. That's how it is”?

Andy: I think I could agree with you on that. And there have been Steiner schools in the U.K.; we call them Steiner schools here, and in think Waldorf schools in America. In Australia, they're the same. There have been a dozen or more Steiner schools in the U.K., and people that don't know much about them, know they're a bit, they're thought of a bit like Montessori schools, a bit quirky and full of hippies and so on.

But recently, near me, about ten miles away, a group of people applied to set up a new Steiner school under a government initiative that basically is willing to give lots of money to anyone who wants to set up a school and can hand in the appropriate paperwork.

In the U.K. it's called the “free school initiative”—so it's essentially removing control of schools from local authorities and into the hands of whoever wants it, really.

Kylie: Oh wow.

Andy: Yes, exactly! So, all well and good—but who is getting this money? So, this looks like it's basically a nationalization of a private Steiner school where privately educated kids are now getting taxpayers' money. And maybe some children are going to get lured in there, but if you go to their website you'll never really understand what they're all about. You won't understand that the education is based on essentially a view of reincarnation, which is quite bizarre and quite racist, really. Steiner believed we have spirits within us that reincarnate into new bodies when we die. And the role of the teacher is not really to teach, but more to serve as a spiritual midwife to incarnate these spirits into the children.

So, you might have heard, for example, how Waldorf Schools delay reading. They think it's better for kids not to read. Well, the reason for that is that Steiner believed that children learning things and actually reading interfered with the incarnation of their spirits and that they shouldn't start to learn things and learn to read in particular until adult teeth had appeared, which was a sort of spiritual milestone in a child's development.

So, what's alarming is that parents are not told this. They're told it's a progressive way of learning, and so on. What the teachers are actually doing is actually stopping children learning until these arbitrary milestones are reached. So, that's one worrying thing, we're not told the true reasons why Steiner schools do these things.

Another big thing is the charge of racism that's been leveled against Steiner's beliefs. Because he believed that the highest spiritual that the spirit could take on was to be found in the body of a Germanic or a Nordic white European. They were seen as the most spiritually advanced people. And that Indians, black people, and Jews were less advanced, and the role of teachers there was then to sort of prepare them for the next incarnation, so that they might be luckier next time around—which is abhorrent, and an abhorrent belief.

Yet another thing that Steiner schools do is that they ascribe temperaments to children. You're given a temperament like “sanguine” or something like that—and they treat you differently according to that. Teachers come up with these labels for children by looking at physical characteristics like the size of their heads and the color of their skin. And they don't believe it's racist because they do this to all children, but from the outside this is pretty bizarre and abhorrent.

Kylie: Is there evidence of such segregation when students are being enrolled? I mean, have parents complained, come into the education department and said, “How come my child can't go to this private school? We've got the money, it looks great, and his friends are going there…” Have people complained?

Andy: Yes, we see parents on the web that are members of Waldorf survivor groups on the web who complain about these kinds of things. And really, it's one of the few places where you can get any insight about what goes on, because they are such an esoteric tradition, and so closed about what they do. It is very difficult to get hard information about what happens.

The worrying fact is that these ideas are not denounced openly and that there isn't a sort of new form of anthroposophy or an evolved form of Steiner's that you can go and see how the ideas have changed over the last 100 years. As far as it's possible to tell, this is a religion (or a cryptoreligion if you like) and Steiner had these revelations through his clairvoyant visions and his believers followed him. And I see no evidence whatsoever that there's any progressiveness away from these early 1920s Austrian racist ideas.

Kylie: Why do you think people aren't speaking out formally? I mean, the students when they graduate, are they doing well on their league tables? Are they getting into good universities?

Andy: Well, that's a very good question. Up till now in the U.K. these have been private schools, so people going to them have been quite wealthy middle class people, maybe with a few hippie‑ish ideas or whatever. So, of course you will come across anecdotes about children who've done very well and gone to Oxford or Cambridge or something like that. You know, they even studied science, we are told, of course.

But that doesn't mean, of course, that if my child goes there or my neighbor's child, that that will be good for them. The data doesn't seem to be there. I'd be very surprised if an education system based on beliefs in astrology or clairvoyance was just so happened going to be better than sort of a mainstream education. It would be incredible, really. So, it's difficult to know what the impact will be. I think our government's sitting on time bomb, essentially.

You'll get early adherents rushing in because they've heard a wonderful thing about Steiner educations. But in a few years, the stories will start creeping out about children not being able to read, being delayed, not progressing with respect to their peers in the same towns and so on, and questions will be asked. I think the government is going to find itself in a lot of trouble in maybe three, four, five years’ time when children start going through difficulties.

For me, I think the biggest worry is that parents are getting involved in the schools and not knowing what they are getting involved in. This is all about informed consent, and especially when the schools instill in them—their views of medicine are just as bonkers, they have homeopathic doctors in the schools, because Steiner was very fond of homeopathy.

In addition, Steiner schools are hotbeds of unvaccinated children; in the U.K., measles outbreaks are occurring around Steiner schools, so much so that last year, when the Steiner schools held their annual interschool Olympics, it had to be cancelled because the schools had a measles outbreak. To me this is incredible, and yet it's very predictable; these ideas of undermining science and undermining medicine and putting lives at risk with some of those views, I think that that's where I think parents ought to know what they're getting themselves in to before they get involved.

Kylie: Are there some suggested actions that we should be taking, in your opinion? I mean, should we be asking our governments about them, should we go down and look at our local Steiner schools?

Andy: That's a good question. What can be done? Raising awareness is the biggest thing, because people are not aware of what Steiner's philosophy is all about and what his approach is. You go to a school's website and you'll just see all cuddly words like, we're children‑centric, and we’re progressive. And all these things that people go, “Oh, that's lovely, you know. We're not fixated on exam league tables or whatever it might be; they're going to treat my child as an individual.”

And yes, of course they treat children as individuals. But they teach them according to their system. We need to raise awareness, ask questions, and bring it out into the open. And it would be surprising if we didn't find lots and lots of problems—because what is a Steiner school unless it's teaching according to the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner?

Read more by Andy Lewis at Quackometer.net.

The Australian Special Broadcasting Service documentary Immortal, written and directed by Sonya Pemberton, has recently won an International News and Documentary Emmy Award in the Outstanding Science and Technology Programming category. Immortal was retitled Decoding Immortality for American audiences and broadcast on the Smithsonian Channel.

Immortal is a film that follows the work of Nobel Prize-winning Australian scientist Professor Elizabeth Blackburn, whose team in 1984 discovered an enzyme deep in the DNA of a single-celled pond creature tetrahymena, leading to studies on the synthesis and function of telomeres. As a result, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2009. The film investigates the inner workings of Professor Blackburn’s studies and the implications it has on ageing, disease and cancer.

On her production company’s website, Pemberton describes her next film Jabbed: Love, Fear and Vaccines:

“Diseases that were largely eradicated forty years ago are returning. Across the world children are dying from preventable conditions because nervous parents are skipping their baby’s shots. And yet the stories of vaccine injury are terrifying, with rare cases of people being hurt, even killed, by vaccines. To vaccinate or not— how do we decide?”

Interviews have been conducted worldwide, from Bhutan to Brisbane, Marseille to Minnesota—including interviews with the likes of Paul A. Offit, MD and the stories of families whose lives are irrevocably altered by the politics of immunization.

I spoke to Sonya at the Australian Science Communicators National Convention, held earlier this year in Sydney, after she presented on a panel called “What’s The Buzz: What’s New in Science Television.”

****

Sonya Pemberton: I am a documentary filmmaker who’s made about fifty hours of TV that I've written and directed. A lot more than that that I've either executive produced or co‑produced or commissioned; I’ve probably done seven hundred hours of television content altogether. But my passion is science and I focus as much as I can on science filmmaking. Sometimes I do films that don't look like science films but underneath they are.

A lot of thought goes into the evidence behind a story; an example of that is one we did a few years ago [on television] with Andrew Denton called Angels and Demons, about mental illness.

That was really funny because a lot of people, even Andrew, said “Well that wasn't a science film,” and I'm going “Yes, it was,” Because I had two researchers on it who only had three weeks notice before we decided to film, and we shot it all in four days. It was a fast turnaround film.

But we did a tremendous amount of research in understanding various mental illnesses and different conditions so that when we were there filming, I had my researcher beside me the whole time, feeding me information about bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or borderline personality disorder. I could remember the details of what we were doing and prompt Andrew in the right ways.

That made it like a social documentary, but actually underneath that is a science documentary. That's how I like to work.

Kylie Sturgess: Do you come from a scientific background?

Sonya: I come from a scientific family; my grandfather was Professor John Pemberton— he died last year at ninety-eight—but he was the man who started epidemiology in Britain and worked with all the great epidemiologists. He started the “International Journal of Epidemiology.” I grew up with his influence being very powerful in my life. My father is a medical doctor, a neonatologist, and very senior in that field. A lot of the family is medically oriented. I originally went to study medicine but didn't. I got sidetracked very quickly in the first year by film and television.

Kylie: How does making a TV series or TV documentaries differ from making a full length documentary, one that might end up in cinemas?

Sonya: That's interesting. Well, there are so many layers to telling science stories. The first thing is whether your science story warrants a two‑minute piece, a five-minute piece, a ten-minute piece, a one-hour piece, etc. Everybody starts off thinking they have at least an hour! Whether it's algae, bats, hummingbirds, or whatever your particular passion is, you initially think everybody wants to hear an hour!

Usually, the average story you read in a newspaper is quite short and can be told in a matter of minutes, which is why the Australian ABC TV show “Catalyst” serves a very vital function doing those short form kinds of investigations. I used to be the executive producer of “Catalyst” and then the manager of the science unit at the ABC. Making that distinction on what is a four-minute, seven-minute, half-hour, one-hour, or ninety-minute story is critical.

These days, I focus on what we call long-form science documentary, which is one hour or longer. I focus on global stories, that being said, I look for Australian science as much as possible. It has to translate into the international market.

I say “market” quite deliberately because it is a marketplace. The reality of funding is usually that you cannot make a film of big international reach and scope without having money from multiple countries.

Kylie: Was that something you learned quite early on when you first started?

Sonya: No! If I went by the clock I went from university to working for Channel Seven as a news editor—and a junior news editor at that! I used to direct video clips—Hunters and Collectors was one of my first clips—and I also did the music video for Talking to a Stranger! That was my first little film. I'm very proud of that still!

When you look at it now, you go “It's so primitive!” But we're talking twenty-odd years ago. Then I worked in drama for years; I became an assistant director, I worked on drama series, drama shows, and feature films. That was interesting, because I thought I wanted to be a drama director. I made short films and things like that. I won some pretty good awards when I was nineteen. I got written up in the local press newspapers for a while.

Kylie: The documentary Immortal—how did you come to choose Elizabeth Blackburn's story?

Sonya: I have two people to thank for that one: I have Dr. Allen Finkel, Chancellor at Monash and a veritable brain wizard, and Robin Williams, of The Science Show at the ABC. Like most people who are into science, I have millions of Google alerts—I follow journals and stories all over the place. I noticed something on telomere biology back in 2003 or 2004.

I was sitting in the ABC cafeteria with Robin Williams and saying “This Elizabeth Blackburn…” and Robin was saying “Oh, I've interviewed her. She's marvelous. She's marvelous!”

Later, I was talking to Allen Finkel; he was also saying how amazing she was. I really honed in and started paying attention and I couldn't believe it. Then it was 2005, and I'm going “A scientist from Tasmania looks into tiny little pond scum creatures and discovers the key to life and death in terms of the genome. Not only has she worked out what it does, how it does it, but how to turn it on and off in these tiny little creatures or in the laboratory.” The implications were so profound.

When I did a bit more research, I realized it had been hyped at beyond belief during the 1980s and early 1990s to the point where it had become invisible again. That mixture of an extraordinary idea; twenty years of research; a female scientist; an Australian scientist —pondering the far reaches of the genome where nobody else wanted to go because it looked boring and dull. She just kept going, because she was tenacious and curious. I loved the way she was so focused.

I flew myself to San Francisco. When I set up I didn't actually have funding, I didn't have any investment. I just decided that I would go find her. I tried to have a meeting with her and she wasn't interested. She didn't answer my emails. She didn't want to talk to me. It turned out that she'd been made one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential thinkers. She didn't want any more media attention. It took me two years of virtually stalking her and finding everything I could to get her to talk to me because I just wanted to make this film!

I tried to convince funding buddies. Nobody wanted to do it. Who is this woman? What has she done? Who cares about telomeres? What do they matter? Genetics? Come on! Crick and Watson, that's kind of the story, isn't it? I just kept going. I kept going and I remember Allen Finkel was fantastic. I rang him and I said “I hear Liz Blackburn is coming to town next week as a guest of Monash. I hear you're having dinner with her.” He put in a good word and the next morning I got a phone call saying that she would talk to me.

It was funny. I went to meet with her. I read every single journal article, like studying for an exam. I'm finally going to get to talk to her! As soon as I walked in the room she said, “Well, I'll assume you know everything there is to know about me. I want to know about you,”

She grilled me and at the end of about twenty minutes she said, “If you still want to make this film let's proceed.”

Kylie: Great!

Sonya: Luckily, we started filming about eight months before she won the Nobel Prize! I didn't have any money at that point but we were filming anyway. Then she won the Nobel Prize and they gave us money… If any funding buddy is listening out there, whenever I say, “I think they're going to win the Nobel Prize,” I've got three out of five right. It's now three out of six!

When you’re asking government bodies and financial institutions to invest in a film idea, often, they want to do the right thing and get science on television, but they can't always tell which stories are going to be the ones that resonate. I feel really glad that we made the story with Liz Blackburn because she allowed it to be open and warm. She relaxed and we didn't have to call her Professor Blackburn. In the whole film we called her Liz, which Americans find really interesting. We told the story in a deceptively light way. That was the real trick of that film, because it was molecular biology at quite a complex level. In telomere biology there are all sorts of gray areas, of course. Distilling that into some sort of bite-sized, palatable pieces that people wanted to travel with was the difficult part.

We've been lucky. We've won about sixteen international awards for it; it's sold into many, many territories. It's screening regularly all over the world. It's been translated into, so far, about eight different languages and we must have had about twenty million viewers by now. So that's pretty cool!

Kylie: That's pretty cool, yes!

Sonya: I'm pretty happy with that. When I just think that I wanted to get this curious story about a Tasmanian who went on to do amazing things. And a woman to boot; I feel somewhat vindicated that we got that story out.

Kylie: Yes. You say, “…and a woman to boot.” Do you think it's difficult for women to be heard?

Sonya: It's difficult in my world of television to find female scientific voices that work for an audience. It's no accident that the majority of science programming is dominated by males. This is just me and pop psychology, but it's partly to do with the fact that those we see as authority figures are often male. There are obviously exceptions, but I fight for those exceptions.

In my current film I am seeking female voices, as usual. I get a thrill when I see women doing amazing stuff in science. Given a lifetime over again I'd be a jazz-singing scientist! I'm trying to live vicariously through what they do and how they work and how they think and feel.

And Liz Blackburn, after finding out that she got pregnant—this is not in the film, but she got pregnant just after she was made Head of Lab in a very male dominated field of microbiology—managed to juggle having a child and being Head of Lab and making these amazing discoveries. You just think “That's a big task.” It's an amazing journey she's been on.

Kylie: Your next production, Jabbed, you've said that you have been seeking out voices to add to the investigation of vaccination claims?

Sonya Pemberton: Yeah. Well, it is not an investigation of anti‑vaccination. I should be really clear. I started out last year thinking I was going to do that, because I got quite a lot of hate mail, I guess you would call it, or nasty emails after I made a film in 2009, called Catching Cancer with Ian Frazer and Professor Harold zur Hausen, Barry Marshall and lots of others, about infections causing cancer. The message behind that film was perhaps that we have taken our eye off that particular cause of cancer. We have got so fixated on the genetics that we have forgotten about infections. That film was nine years in the making and the other was only five!

Along the way, it tells the story of the cervical cancer vaccine, as an example of the fact once you discover a cancer is caused by an infection, this is extremely good news. Then you can interfere with that process. A good way of doing that is to prevent it. Vaccines can do that. I was completely unprepared for the mail that I got attacking me for “doing damage,” even though some of it was very nicely worded. Of course, some of it was not. It just made me realize that I knew there was controversy over the vaccine—of course I did know that, I had done a lot of research into it—but, I didn't expect it to get personal. When that happened, it just made me interested.

Kylie: That is a good response—to say, “OK. Why?”

Sonya: Yes, “Well, what's going on?” Then, talking to some people all over the world, I realized they have drawers full of hate mail and worse.

Rather than just feel like I want to attack people, although there was part of me that did get angry and feel offended, I realized that they must be very driven people. I have spent a year of my life thinking very carefully about this issue now and listening to the people, who are frightened and maybe not even frightened. They’re just concerned or don't know who to believe and don't know which way to turn. I have spent a year talking to people on street corners, at bus stops in Paris, Germany, London, America, and across Australia, all over the world, asking people what they think about vaccinations.

I am discovering—particularly in the younger age group, under forty, but even more specifically, under thirty, but definitely in the twenty to forty year age group—there is a lot of doubt and about not just vaccination. But about science and its ability to communicate what it is doing. People don't fully trust authority.

I spent a lot of time really listening to it. I actually put my head under the sand for little while. I felt like I wanted to give up and run away. This is too hard. I thought it was just going to make a film about the science. But I have realized that the science is only part of the story.

The real story going on here is how people feel and how people think and how people think they think. You have to watch the film to work out how I get there. But I am trying very hard not to have balance, because that's a false concept. I have made enough films that I don't think balance is quite the right word. I'm going to piss off both sides actually!

Kylie: Is that necessarily a bad thing?

Sonya: No, it's not. I don't think I will piss anybody off that badly, to be honest! People will realize what I'm trying to do—can I succeed in having a communication that says, “You know what? This is not as polarized as we think. It's not.” The us-and-them mentality is not doing any of us any good really. It is counterproductive. Demonizing and ridiculing people is counterproductive. When there are genuine concerns and people hurting and scary stories and conflicting information, personally my job as a science communicator is to try and improve the situation if I can. I might not be able to, but if I can.

That's quite deep and meaningful. But I do feel that I have made enough films now that I know films can reach large numbers of people. They can be nothing, but just sit on the couch one night—and they are gone. Just like that.

Or, they can get out into the ether and they can start conversations and they can circulate and they can be seen multiple times and they can start discussions—I am hoping that Jabbed will do that. I am really grateful to the families, who have offered their stories. Because the families come from those who have experienced the diseases that the vaccines could have prevented, but for various reasons didn't. The stories also come from those very rare individuals, who have genuine vaccine injuries and vaccine reactions. I personally make a distinction between those two.

I am hoping that, for those that just don't know which way is up, it might help a little.

The full interview with Sonya Pemberton features at Token Skeptic, Episode #111.

The Merseyside Skeptics recently launched a video called Testing the Shuzi Sports Band. In the video, you can see Vice President Michael Marshall and other members of the Merseyside Skeptics put the Shuzi Qi band, a so-called athletic enhancement bracelet to the test, from the Merseyside Skeptics website:

Sports performance technology manufacturers Shuzi Qi came under fire today after product tests revealed their performance-enhancing wristband to be ineffective... Despite marketing claims that the product aids a player’s performance, the demonstration showed that when a player is unsure which band he’s wearing, the £60 product makes no discernible difference.

In order to find out more about its creation, I spoke to Mike Hall of the Merseyside Skeptics; we’d met previously at the QEDCon in 2010. The convention will be returning to Manchester in 2012 from April 13 - 14.

******

Kylie Sturgess: Firstly, for those persons who don't know what a sports performance wristband is, what do they involve?

Mike Hall: These bands have been on the market for a few years now, and the manufacturers claim that they interact with the body's bio fields by some mechanism. In the case of the Power Balance Bracelet for example, which is probably the most famous one, they have a special hologram that interacts with the bio field of the body—whatever that is. And somehow (by mechanisms they usually don't adequately explain) this improves an athlete's concentration and performance. Balance was the big one, hence the name “Power Balance” and that sort of thing.

And then they marketed these things to athletes. And usually the way they market these things to athletes is to get notable athletes to wear the things and thus aspiring athletes will see them and go, “Oh, well, famous athlete X wears a wristband and therefore I must also wear this band.”

They've been in the market for a few years now, and as I say, Power Balance was the most famous one, but skeptics in Australia have done fantastic work in kind of chasing Power Balance out of the country. I think that the story goes that the TGA demanded that they publish something on the website saying that they still don't work, after the TGA investigated, that these bands have the evidence lacking.

Power Balance ended up going bankrupt and quitting the country. And they have published something on the website saying they still don't work, but this has kind of left a powerful vacuum in the sports performance band area that all these copycat bands have rushed in with their own technology and tried to fill. They say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Power Balance, that was all nonsense, but our thing does the same thing, but ours actually works.”

Sturgess: There isn't that much of a difference between them then? In the video where you deal with the Merseyside Skeptics, you investigated the Shuzi band. Aren’t they all kind of the same?

Hall: They're all broadly the same as best as I can see. In the case of Shuzi, they say that the special chip in the band interacts with your body's bio field in order to give you all these performance benefits in your sporting ability. In the case of Power Balance, it was a hologram. And there are various others, power bands, and various others on the market and they all claim they have some pseudotechnological explanation for what their band does and why it works.

In the case of Shuzi, they say that their microchip uses “nanovibrational technology,” which is pretty much three scientists standing some words in a line!

The claim is that they “unclump your blood” and they use known pseudoscientific techniques to demonstrate that this is the case. They use live blood analysis, which is a long debunked nonsense diagnostic that actually doesn't work at all as far as I'm aware. Then, they apply kinesiology—which is, I believe, actually an old vaudeville act that was appropriated in the 1960s by a chiropractor—in order to promote this sort of stuff!

Then there's the balance test that people are likely to be familiar with, the one where you stand on one leg, they push your arm, and you fall forward. But then they put the magic band on you and they do it again and suddenly you don't fall over.

Basically, it's a magic trick, but it's one of those magic tricks that you can perform without necessarily knowing that you're doing it. Kind of like cold reading in that you can fool yourself into thinking that you're not actually doing a magic trick, but in reality, you're being manipulated through use of the ideomotor effect.

But yes, as best I can see they're all more or less the same. They all have a different piece of pseudo-technological nonsense to explain them: “We have a special piece of technology that interacts with your body in some way to make it better,” in whatever way it is they lay claim.

Sturgess: The Merseyside Skeptics have recently produced a video testing the Shuzi bands—was it difficult finding participants for it?

Hall: No, we're very lucky in terms of finding participants for it. The story goes is we have a tip off from the Australians, again, who said, “Shuzi is coming to the UK," and I believe Shuzi already has withdrawn from Australia as a result of criticism? Not only that, I learned that their head distribution channel is going to be based in Liverpool. Which is in Mersey, right? So, it's on my patch and if you're going to set up on my patch, well, you're going to have to deal with me!

Michael Marshall (a.k.a. Marsh), the Vice President of the Merseyside Skeptics, initially tried to engage with Shuzi; he called them up and said, “You know, we're very interested in your bands, but we're not sure—you know, we'd like to put it to the test and see if it works.”

And Shuzi seemed very receptive to that idea and said, “Yes, we'd be interested in working with you on a test,” and then suddenly stopped returning calls!

So Marsh would call them up and these calls would just ring out and go to voicemail and he would send them emails and they wouldn't get back to him. And then, one of the guys at Merseyside Skeptics, a guy called Warren, said, “Well, if they're not willing to cooperate on a test, why don't we just do the test. We could do the test.”

So Marsh called me up and said, “Why don't we just devise a test?” Now, as luck would have it, my brother is a rugby player. And as luck would also have it, my brother is the team’s kicker!

And in a further stroke of luck, my dad is the groundsman at the local rugby club! So I was able to get access to the grounds. I was able to get access to a rugby player, and I was also able to get access to a rugby field.

I liked the idea of using kicks, because it was a binding outcome. It was either there was a goal or there wasn't a goal. It wasn't something like how far can he kick it, since there's a subjective thing in that, or how good was the kick and all that. It was a good, solid, yes or no, black or white; a binary outcome.

I was on a phone call to Marsh, I said, “Oh, I've got this fantastic idea. Why don't we get my brother in? My dad can let us use the pitch. My brother can do the kicks. And kicks are good, they're a binary outcome. We'll do this test.”

Then I phoned my brother up and said, “Look, are you interested? Do you think this is the right thing to do?” And he was a bit hesitant at committing to a hundred kicks because normally, when he's practicing, he'd do maybe twenty. So a hundred was a big deal for him! But yes, he quite readily agreed once I'd explained to him what we were trying to do.

Sturgess: Alice Howarth, the physiologist from the University of Liverpool, said in the video that it was not a statistically significant difference in terms of performance when the band was worn and when the band wasn't worn. What was the test that was used?

Hall: We used a chisquared analysis that was suggested to us by Chris French, Professor Chris French at Goldsmith's, University of London, who we're very friendly with at Merseyside Skeptics. He's a good friend. And so, when we were devising the test, we got on to Chris and we said, “Look, is a hundred kicks enough for this to be statistically significant results?” And, “What statistical techniques should we be using to analyze this data?”

And Chris suggested that we use the chisquared analysis, which when we ran the figures through the chisquared analysis we came out with a P-value of 0.5.

My understanding a P-value is limited but it has to be a value of 0.05, so actually an entire order of magnitude difference before you could consider the results to be statistically significant.

Sturgess: Do you think that the results will generalize to athletes developing skepticism about other products? I mean, colored tape, protein supplements, shoes and other kinds of performance enhancers, that Marsh mentioned at the start of the video?

Hall: It certainly generalized that for my brother, who in the aftermath of the test said to me, “That was very, very exhausting and I was hating it towards the end. But ultimately, I'm really interested in this kind of thing,” because as a semiprofessional sportsman, he encounters this sort of nonsense all the time. Whether it is like the energy drinks or the whey protein shakes, or just even things like people having lucky socks.

For example, if you go into the changing rooms at these rugby clubs, everybody gets dressed in a particular order. They’ll come in wearing their street clothes, and then they'll strip off completely from the waist down and leave the top half of their clothes on and then put their left sock on and their left boot on, and then the right sock and the right boot on and put their shorts on over the top of that. Then, once they've gone that far, that's when they start taking off their top in order to put the shirt on. And it's just a superstitious thing! “Oh, the last time we played and I did really well, I put my sock and my boot on and then my sock and then my boot and I didn't take my shirt off until later.”

And everybody does this and that in a different order. And so, my brother, who is a bit skeptically inclined himself, just from listening to me rant and rave about it over family dinners, observes these behaviors in his club and says, “This is obviously, clearly nonsense.” However, these superstitions go on in sports all the time. And he's now really fascinated. He wants to know how much of this is true and how much of this is nonsense. Can we come up with tests for these behaviors? Can we come up with tests for prescription shoes? And can we come up with tests for getting dressed in an appropriate order and all that sort of stuff?

So he's very enthusiastic about it. I don't know if we can come up with tests possible for other items, but it certainly seems to have engaged his interest. Whether he'll engage in that more formally, I have no idea!

Sturgess: Do you have any other tests planned? I mean, I know the Merseyside Skeptics are incredibly proactive out there in Liverpool.

Hall: We've got nothing planned at the moment in terms of in this area of sports. What we are planning to do because the video was always meant to be a piece of public engagement—it was really never meant to be a science experiment. It was meant to be something that we could put out there and as a piece of public engagement with science. And so, what we said up front is we wanted it to be about as statistically representative as the average Mythbusters episode. That's the angle we were kind of pitching it at. But it's got to be rigorous enough to be convincing but not so rigorous as to make it useless as a piece of public engagement.

Having actually finished the test, and looked back at the protocol that we came up with, we are actually thinking of writing it up and seeing if we can get it published in a journal. With the numbers involved, you've only got one player who does a hundred kicks, the numbers involved aren't that spectacular, but the methodology is so solid.

We had a doubleblind protocol and the way that the protocol worked is we bought two of these Shuzi bands and I took one of the bands and drilled the microchip out of it. So what Shuzi claimed was the active ingredient was therefore not present in one of these bands. So I removed the microchip from one of them and then covered the hole where the microchip was with electrical tape on both bands so you couldn't visually tell them apart.

Those two bands were then handed over to Alice, unaware of which one was the control band and which one was the active band. Alice then split the hundred kicks into ten blocks of ten and used a random number generator to decide which band was for which test so something like: band X, and then Y, Y, Y, Y, X, X, X, Y, X, X, Y (where we'd labeled them X and Y).

Alice was then responsible for attaching the band, with no idea whether she was attaching an active band or control; she only knew X or Y.

David, my brother, was our player who would go out onto the pitch and, unaware of what band he was wearing, even if he knew whether it was X or Y, he wouldn't know whether X was the real band or the control band. Then the people gathering data on the pitch didn't have any idea whether it was X or Y, or if X or Y was the appropriate thing.

We were blind right across the board, and I wasn't permitted to talk to Alice for the duration of the test, and Alice wasn't allowed out of the changing room to interact with people on the pitch during the test.

We were quite rigorous about it because, at the end of the day, we took it really seriously. We could have fudged the results completely in our favor if we wanted to, but that would have been intellectually dishonest, and it's not something that we were interested in doing.

If there was a genuine effect that would have actually been cool, but there wasn't, and we didn't really expect there to be. But we still wanted to make sure that our biases didn't influence the test like that, so we were quite rigorous with the methodology of the test.

There was never really a question of putting that level of detail into the video because we think that, actually, as a piece of public engagement, would probably turn people off. For the science community, the people who are interested in that, we are going to publish the full protocol, and it's going to be up on the Merseyside Skeptics website.

Sturgess: I look forward to hearing the public's response to it; it’s appearing in newspapers?

Hall: We've had commitments from a few newspapers in the UK. They're going to run it on their websites and embed the video, which hopefully can show how much oomph we can make with this in terms of the public and see Shuzi's response to it as well.

We went to Shuzi last week and said, “Look, we went ahead and did this test anyway and it turned out that your band didn't work any better than a control band. What have you got to say about that?” So far, they haven't actually come back with any sort of response.

So it will be interesting to see how Shuzi react to that, because I imagine they're going to have journalists of all stripes on the phone to them for the rest of the week saying, “Well, what do you have to say about this?”

Fingers crossed. Hopefully we'll be able to make a splash with this.

Sturgess: Most unskeptically, fingers crossed!

Hall: Ah, the irony of saying fingers crossed as a skeptic!

Sturgess: I know—it's brilliant! Thank you so much for talking to me, Mike Hall.

The Merseyside Skeptics site can be found at http://www.merseysideskeptics.org.uk.

In 2013, QEDCon will be held in Manchester from April 13 - 14, with more details at http://www.qedcon.org.

Illustration by Neil Davies. Card by Crispian Jago.

Robin Ince is a comedian you might recognise as the co-presenter of BBC Radio’s The Infinite Monkey Cage with physicist Brian Cox—he’s also the creator of stage-show and author of The Bad Book Club: One Man’s Quest to Uncover the Books That Taste Forgot and the creator of the Australian feature movie Razzle Dazzle.

I spoke to him after he returned from Alom Shaha’s book launch for The Young Atheist’s Handbook, about science, comedy and how he brings them together to make shows like Nine Lessons And Carols For Godless People, and his most recent tour, Happiness Through Science.

Kylie Sturgess: What first got you started in comedy?

Robin Ince: A think it was something from a long time ago, as a child—like all children—I liked things from my generation: The Goodies, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy. When I was about ten years old, the alternative comedy scene began in the UK, which was originally Alexei Sayle, and Rik Mayall. I found it a very exciting thing as an eleven-year old to see this very vibrant, physical, and energetic comedy. I became quite obsessed at that point: from then on my schoolbooks often featured the logos of bands, etc. I would use the logos and opening credit sequences of comedy shows, television, and radio. That was it really—then, around the age of fifteen I started going to comedy clubs in London and just watching.

I knew from a very early age, once I stopped wanting to be a zookeeper, I wanted to be some kind of writer, or possibly some kind of performer. The alternative comedy scene did seem incredible; I suppose for me it was kind of like punk, because I was a little bit too young for punk. This anarchic, politically crazed comedy was the thing that got me into it. Actually, I did a gig with Ben Elton about a month ago in London and he really couldn't believe that some comedians wander on and kind of don't know exactly what they're going to say, which is very interesting because I think it, in one way, is quite old school. I was always a big fan of his in the 1980s.

That was the first thing I found fascinating about stand up, was when I would go and see stand up comedians and the first time...I think this is true for many audiences: you kind of make yourself believe that the comedians are making it all up as they stand there. And when you go and see it a second time, you go, “Oh, no. The words are all the same. They even make the same off-the-cuff comment about that bloke in the left hand side of the stage!” So that was quite an interesting wake up, I suppose!

Sturgess: You’ve clearly always been a comedy enthusiast—have you also always been a science enthusiast?

Ince: Well, I went off science for a while. I was very enthusiastic about science when I was young—again, like most children. I always use that quote by Carl Sagan: “All children are born natural scientists and then they have it beat out of them.” And I think that's what happened to me at about the age of thirteen—suddenly physics was being taught in a tremendously dull manner.

It seemed, at least for most of the science teachers I had, that science kind of had nothing to do with the world—which I always find an amazing trick that can happen in the education system, where something that is about the entirety of everything that we do every single day suddenly becomes just a selection of experiments which are disembodied from the world.

And so, I went off science and then in my twenties I started getting excited and interested again. I started reading. I think I read Richard Dawkins's Blind Watchmaker and the first thing that really got me back into it was James Randi's Skeptical Investigator book. That then got me into the skeptic movement…which then got me into reading Carl Sagan again. And slowly, the excitement of everything that was in the universe kind of caught up with me once again.

Sturgess: What do you think has given science its recent boost in popularity? For example, The Geek Manifesto by Mark Henderson suggests it's tied into a need for greater political activism in that regard and comedy and pop culture obviously plays a part. Do you see it differently?

Ince: Well, I think it's fairly hard...I don't think it's possible to actually go down to one thing and say, “This is what has made science so popular.” When you see the size of audiences at some of the biggest shows that I've got on with friends of mine, it's a very broad audience out there. And certainly things like the shows of Brian Cox shows that you have a really broad TV audience, as well.

I think there are lots of things that have come together. My personal feeling is that the mass media has become increasingly trite. The stories within it are banal. The celebrity obsession; the level of emptiness, which is being thrust at us from television and from the news media. I think people suddenly wanted more. A certain group of people certainly wanted more: they felt that they were getting nothing from what had previously been the quality press and quality television.

I think then you've also got things like the sequencing of the human genome—that is something that can capture the imagination. The idea of us beginning to understand the code that makes each one of us this selfconscious individual that we are and the fact that they have got to the early stages of sequencing that. Now we've just got to work out exactly what all the letters mean!

I think someone once described it as saying, “Right, we've found all the letters now that make the book “Crime and Punishment”—we've just got to put them in the right order.” I think that’s exciting! Also, think about things like CERN and the Large Hadron Collider. Even though people are not really that certain what it means if we find the particle that may be the reason everything has mass, when you look at the architecture of something like the LHC, there is a tremendous level of awe. The space race gave us—children at the time—the same incredible sense of awe. Even now when I see anything being launched into space there is a certain kind of tingle that you get!

So I think there are those things. I think, also, there are the anti-science elements. I think things like a lot of the new age bamboozling bits of rubbish; the attempted rise of intelligent design/creationism has fired people up not to be led down that route back into the dark ages.

So I think all of that. Also, to reference Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, I think the atheist side of things comes into it. I also think the work of Brian Cox, certainly in the United Kingdom, has really captured the imagination as well. So I think many things have come together.

And who knows? It may well actually be the benevolent move by the media to become tremendously banal that has led to a rise in the desire to know about the world!

Sturgess: It'd be great to think that the rise of popularity of science in pop culture leads to scientific literacy, as well.

Ince: In terms of pop-science books now, there are an incredible number of scientists who are getting better and better at conveying comprehensible messages to the public. I think one of the hardest things for a general population is that science has a kind of delayed gratification.

You can look at a painting or a film and have an immediate reaction. If you are trying to understand some idea about particle physics or about Planck time, whatever it may be, it takes a while. You're not going to get an immediate reward. You have to do a lot of reading and thinking and looking up at the sky and trying to comprehend what you've taken in before you then get the reward of going, “Ah, I have some understanding.”

I think in the culture that we have at the moment, which is a very sound-bite culture, it means there is a certain amount of re-education and rewiring of our own brains.

Also, by the way, going back to a previous question, I think the Internet has played an enormous role in terms of that we can now have this communication and the people like skeptics and the outsider kids, as well! You could be in a town, a small town, and feel like you're the only one. This level of connection, I think, has played a great part in it, as well.

But overall, yes. I think people are realizing that there's a reason. It's bit like over here. We had a big campaign about homeopathy revealing the homeopathy farce.

Sturgess: Yes, I run a skeptical group and was the “overdose” organizer in my hometown, and then I went to QEDCon in order to celebrate the 10:23 campaign over there, too.

Ince: Oh, fantastic. What did you OD on?

Sturgess: We just went to our local chemists and bought up the entire shelf of what they had there and did it in front of their shop! And over in Berlin, for the recent World Skeptics Congress, they gave each one of the presenters their very own lucky vial of homeopathic treatment of Berlin Wall!

Ince: Oh, those ideas are just great! It's fascinating, because I think a lot of people in the public generally don’t realize what homeopathic remedies are. In fact, I didn't until a few years ago. I just presumed they were some kind of herbal remedy. Very few people know that they're basically sugar pills.

I think that's another way that you tap into people, is when you get into their own personal life, which is once you feel that you're going, “Hang on. I've paid $12 for this tiny little thing that is full of just sugar pills?”

And once you say to them, “Well, it may well even help your pocket, understanding the world.” If you have a comprehension of how you're being ripped off, you can go, “Ah, I need to know how I'm being bamboozled.” I think that plays a part, as well.

I do think that yes, scientific literacy is something great – the most exciting thing is we had a kind of history boom here about ten years ago, with a lot of shows, popular history shows. And it caught the imagination of people. And then, these kinds of things drift off and they stop being featured on the big table at the front of the bookshop.

But I think what's exciting about the science boom at the moment is because there are lots of quite young kids getting into it, as well, that's something that's not going to disappear. Suddenly we are seeing, certainly in the United Kingdom, we're seeing an enormous uptake in people getting physics degrees at the moment. And in a lot of the shows that I'm involved with, we have ten, eleven, twelve year olds coming.

So what I think is exciting is they hopefully will grow up and stick with it. If you put the seed in there early enough, they're not going to go: “Oh, that's the science fad over and done with”—much in the same way that many people were inspired by Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Hopefully, I hope the same thing is going to happen with many of the popular science programs that are around.

Sturgess: I also think that it's important not just to get into science but If you have the interest and inclination to become science communicators. I think it's most unfair that you’ve described yourself as “the passionate idiot who is the vessel between the audience and the science popularizers!”

Ince: Well, I do care. I genuinely do. It probably sounds disingenuous. Once I've started to realize how little I knew, that kind of Socratic moment that may well occur, I looked at my face and realized how little I knew!

I think that helps in terms of communication because when we have on the radio shows that I do with Brian, “The Infinite Monkey Cage,” there are a lot of very big ideas which I really don't understand.

As you know, once you start really getting into science you suddenly go: “Wow, I will die with a wealth of knowledge absent from my brain; I will never understand some things.” I think that because I can be honest and say this very little I know, I can acknowledge that I'm just trying to find out as much as possible before I die.

That can help to be the vehicle for other people, like me, who are interested but may well not know the terms. This is one of the things that is involved with any kind of language. With the language of science, sometimes people are embarrassed to get involved in it in the first place because they realize the level of stupidity that they have.

I'm going to be honest with you, when you meet a scientist you think, “I know almost nothing, but this is roughly what I know about this.” And if you’re lucky, they can look at you and go: “Well, you don't know very much. But I'll take you on a little bit of a journey.”

Sturgess: And the journey can be absolutely wonderful as you show within the work that you do. What about being a skeptic—do you think that's a label that still has too much baggage?

Ince: Well, the thing is it's so confusing because there are so many labels that we can have, depending on your position. Some are secularists and skeptics and atheists and it goes on and on.

I think what's good about the skeptic community recently is that there was a time where quite a few years ago I suppose where suddenly it just seemed it was mainly psychic mediums, Loch Ness, Bigfoot, and all of those things; general bits of nonsense that are fun to debunk. But whether that really has much point anymore—the trouble with psychic mediums is it doesn't matter how many times we can reveal that a psychic is a charlatan, reveal their methods, etc., it doesn't seem to ultimately have an effect on the number of people they can play to.

I think now that the skeptic movement has managed to engage with more and more general science and realized that the real tools to give people are not the smaller ideas, like just having a look at how psychics work, but rather the bigger ideas, such as having a look at the universe as a whole.

I think that sometimes as skeptics we can be just a little bit like: “Nowadays it's pathetic, isn't it, all these people who believe in psychic mediums….” But the first thing we have to realize is that the way that people's brains are wired means that we all have a possibility of being wooed by the nonsensical.

We need to be judgmental of those who are like the psychic mediums, etc., but not judgmental of their audience. I think the skeptic movement has really broadened out increasingly with trying to give people the tools to understand whether they are being bullshitted or not.

Sturgess: I have another quote by you, which I think is a wonderful one: “You're not going to woo people by attacking what they believe in. You woo people by showing them something more exciting and more interesting.” Now that must be very difficult to maintain at times, I think, but still very valuable.

Ince: I think sometimes you can just have fun being facetious. There's no reason not to. Some of the engagements that I have with climate change deniers!

When you are at the level of journalists who are enjoying their contrarian position, just these rather unpleasant showoffs who are like men doing a little dance for their mother… they're all ghastly people. Then you can speak facetiously because they're not interested in knowing anything else apart from sitting in their very dogmatic and profitable position.

But I think overall when we're dealing with day-to-day people who may well have been misinformed: that’s different. If you're dealing with someone who is a creationist or believes in intelligent design—for many people the reason they believe in it is merely because they have been fed a lot of nonsense: there are no transitional fossils; the eye is too complicated; the flagellum; and so on. And there you do get a chance of telling them tremendously exciting stories about this long journey to selfconscious life that has happened.

You can first of all say, “Well, you've been in some ways misled by some of the facts you've been given.” But I think you can also start to tell them these wonderful narratives, this very slow process that has led to the creature that is wired as it is. I think that's going to be much better than merely laughing in their face.

But, as I said, there are certain people where laughing in their faces is the best weapon. I made fun of one of the climate change denier journalists over here and he gets very uppity and he's very upset by it. Someone like Christopher Hitchens is a good contrarian—he realized that part of being a contrarian was you have to take a lot of shit from other people as well and take it on the chin. And unfortunately a lot of the right wing contrarians, certainly in the United Kingdom, are also very thin skinned. So they like being a contrarian until someone then makes fun of them. And then they go, “That's really unfair. I'm going to sue!”—which is great fun.

Sturgess: You are currently touring with a show called Happiness Through Science. Where can people go to find out more about it?

Ince: I think I've got a website. I really should make it a more active website. The Happiness Through Science tour is the longest tour I've ever done. I normally do four different tours a year, but this one I'm doing for a whole year. It's the most fun I've ever had; here’s another Carl Sagan quote, when he talked about science once and imparting information, he said, “When you are in love, you want to tell everyone.” I have to admit that I find it’s that, with the Happiness Through Science show; it’s something that I would love to bring to Australia.

It's not in any way a parochial show; it deals, in very broad strokes, with a lot of ideas. Again, I just find it exciting. Pretty much every single night, someone from the audience afterwards in the bar will say, “Do you know that idea you were talking about earlier? There is a new paper that may well advance the comedy routine, you see, you have actually misunderstood the idea of the olfactory receptor there. We realize you have done it for the purpose of the joke. But we believe...,” and so on and so on—all these wonderful bits of feedback that you get!

Then, people write in and say, “Which Richard Feynman book were you reading from?” And knowing that people will then go out and buy a Richard Feynman book, just based on a bloke jumping around on stage and occasionally quoting from Feynman, is wonderful—I always count myself as a reading list comedian! My shows are generally about talking for two and a half hours, being very excited about things that you should be excited about too.

Robin Ince’s site can be found at www.robinince.com.