Lincoln and his colleagues suggested that the “royal blood” is that of Jesus Christ, who did not die on the cross but survived the ordeal, married Mary Magdalene, had a child, Sarah, and the bloodline secretly survived and continued for 400 years, up to the Merovingian dynasty of the Franks of dark-age Europe. Jesus died an old man in France, where he fled with his family to escape prosecution from Peter and the Apostoles, and was buried near a little town on the Pyrenees, Rennes-le-Château.

This amazing story was supposedly kept secret for two millennia by the Priory of Sion, a mysterious sect that is said to have also founded the Order of the Templars. Notwithstanding the secrecy, clues to this concealed story were scattered throughout the centuries by some initiates belonging to the Priory, such as Leonardo da Vinci, [1] Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Claude Debussy. This is how Lincoln and friends have been able to reassemble the story, uncoding hidden names, enigmas, wordplays, and hints hidden in various paintings.

But is this all true?

In order to better understand the story, I visited the remote town of Rennes-le-Château (RLC) on the Pyrenees last July.

The Legendary Treasure

The story of the RLC myth starts in 1969, when Henry Lincoln read a thriller by French author Gérard de Sède, titled Le trésor maudit (The Cursed Treasure). In the fictional story, the treasure of the title had been found around 1891 by the priest of RLC after he deciphered some old documents hidden in the local church.

The priest was Bérenger Saunière, who had been the priest of RLC since 1885. RLC sits on top of a hill, about 40 kilometers from Carcassonne, in France.

The church, dedicated to Mary Magdalene, was almost in ruins when Saunière arrived in RLC. Having raised some money, the priest started restoration around 1887. From here on, facts are few and fantasy creeps in. According to legend, by moving a heavy stone that served as the altar, Saunière found that one stone pillar supporting the slab was hollow and contained four parchments. Two of them detailed a genealogy, while the other two presented enigmatic writings that, once deciphered by experts in Paris, allowed Saunière to obtain some very strange messages.

One of the most important ones was the following: A Dagobert II Roi et a Sion est ce tresor et il est la mort (“To King Dagobert II and to Sion belongs this treasure, and he is dead there”).

While in Paris, the priest bought reproductions of a few paintings, including Nicholas Poussin’s The Shepards of Arcadia. The painting, dated 1640, shows some people standing close to a sarcophagus holding the inscription: Et in Arcadia Ego (“And in Arcadia, I”). It was said that the sarcophagus really existed near Rennes-le-Château and was identified by matching the mountain profile on the painting with the real one.

Meanwhile, work at the church continued, and another stone slab was found under the floor, but only Saunière had access to it and could see what was behind it. From that moment on, the priest began long and secretive searches of the surrounding area, and after that, the restorations started once again. This time, however, funds seemed limitless, and Saunière used them to buy land and to build a number of constructions around his parish church, including a bizarre “Tower of Magdala” honoring Mary Magdalene. He also filled the church with mysterious statues and had various Latin inscriptions written all around the place, including one at the entrance of the church which reads: Terribilis est locus iste (“This place is terrifying”).

Where did Saunière’s riches came from? According to Lincoln and colleagues, Saunière found a treasure that included much more than valuable antiquities. Buried in Rennes-le-Château were documents confirming that Jesus Christ had come to live in France with his family and that his child initiated a dynasty which eventually became known as the Merovingian Kings of France.

One of the secret messages stated that the “treasure,” (meaning the secret of the bloodline) belonged to King Dagobert II, a Merovingian, and to the Priory of Sion. “And he is dead there,” then, may indicate the presence of a sepulchre containing the body of Christ. Such a tomb, it was reasoned, was the one painted by Poussin, since the phrase Et in Arcadia ego could be anagrammatized: I! Tego arcana dei, meaning: “Go away! I hold the secrets of God.”

With such notions in hand, Saunière could have turned Christianity on its head and inspired a whole new interpretation of world history. So why not use it to blackmail the Vatican and obtain wealth by these means?

Decoding the Enigma

But this, as I said, is the legendary version of the story. The facts are quite different, and I had the opportunity to verify this during my trip to RLC. The hollow pillar that contained the parchments, for example, is still preserved in the museum of the village, and you can see that it is not hollow at all but has only a very small hole (the size of a CD box), where no parchments could be hidden. Saunière’s trip to Paris may be another invention, since no proof of it exists.

The pillar at Rennes-le-Château.

As to the sepulchre painted by Poussin, thanks to my colleague Mariano Tomatis I was able to locate the exact spot where it was said to exist. However, such a tomb did not exist when Poussin created his painting in 1640, because the tomb was built in 1933. It is true that it resembled the one in the painting, but it also resembled the dozens of similar tombs scattered around the area. After continuous invasions by treasure hunters, the tomb was destroyed in 1988. Furthermore, the profile of the mountains in the painting bears only a slight resemblance to similar mountains around the area.

Other enigmas have simpler solutions. The inscription that reads, “This place is terrifying” actually is a biblical quotation (Genesis 28:17) meaning “This place is wonderful.” (The complete phrase is: “How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the House of God, and this is the gate of Heaven.”

Another inscription that appears at the base of a crucifix, “Christus A.O.M.P.S. Defendit,” had been translated by some as Christus Antiquus Ordo Mysticusque Prioratus Sionis Defendit (“Christ defends the ancient mystical order of the Priory of Sion”). In reality, that is a common phrase used in some Catholic inscriptions, like the one in Rome on Pope Sisto V’s obelisk: Christus Ab Omni Malo Plebem Suam Defendat (“Christ defends his people against every evil”).

While no documents and no secrets were discovered, however, it is true that the priest found some valuable artifacts during restorations of the church. He noted such a discovery in his notebooks and tried to keep it secret in order to sell the objects and raise money. He also started to excavate the church’s surroundings, hoping to find more.

Is this, then, the true and only source of Saunière’s wealth? Actually, there was something else. Rumors had spread around of Saunièr’s spending attitudes, and the local Catholic bishop investigated the matter, concluding that the priest had made his money from “trafficking in Masses,” a quite common wrongdoing among nineteenth and early-twentieth-century priests. In the Catholic Church, Masses can be celebrated for the benefit of a specific soul, in the hope of helping a deceased loved one to ascend from Purgatory into Heaven. Masses can also be said for a specific aim for the benefit of living persons (for instance, for healing purposes). Prior to Vatican II, priests received a stipend for each Mass they said. “Trafficking in Masses” meant, in practice, that priests advertised their willingness to celebrate a great number of Masses for both the dead and the living. Advertising in this way was regarded as a kind of unfair competition with other priests and was condemned by the Church. The matter became even worse, of course, when priests failed to celebrate the Masses requested, despite having received the appropriate payment.

The bishop traced advertisements placed by Saunière in Catholic magazines throughout France, and even abroad, and quickly determined that he could not possibly have celebrated all the Masses he had received payments for, thus in fact defrauding his “clients.”

In 1909, the Bishop asked Saunière to leave RLC; the priest refused and was suspended from his priestly duties and privileges, thus ending his ecclesiastical career. He died in 1917 and left all his belongings to his housekeeper, Marie Denarnaud.

The Would-be King

Now another question remains to be answered: Who invented such an incredible story? As usually happens in every thriller, the culprit is almost always the one who stands to gain from the crime. Though there is no crime here, there could have been, and the perpetrator would have been one Pierre Plantard.

Plantard was an anti-Semite and the leader of a minor occult, right-wing organization known as Alpha Galates. His scheme was quite ingenious and complex. He had the parchments made by an artist friend, Philippe de Cherisey; then, he passed them on as real to Gérard de Sède, to whom he also told the invented story of Saunière’s findings.

Plantard also invented the Priory of Sion in 1956 and created fake manuscripts and documents that linked the Priory to RLC and deposited them at the National Library in Paris, where he suggested Lincoln and friends go to look for important discoveries.

But why go to all this trouble? All this and more was necessary in order to demonstrate not only that Plantard was the current Grand Master of the elusive Priory but also that he was the last descendant of the Merovingians. This meant that he was the current vessel of Christ’s holy blood and, above all, the heir to the throne of France as its legitimate king.

The scheme did not work out, however; there were no descendants after Dagobert II, and there were no living Merovingians pretenders to the throne that fell with Louis XVI. Plantard’s fake geneology quickly dissolved under close scrutiny.

As Umberto Eco wrote in his novel Foucault’s Pendulum, “Believe that there is a secret and you will feel an initiate. It doesn’t cost a thing. Create an enormous hope that can never be eradicated because there is no root. Ancestors that never were will never tell you that you betrayed them. Create a truth with fuzzy edges: when someone tries to define it, you repudiate him. Why go on writing novels? Rewrite history.” And this is exactly what Pierre Plantard and his followers tried to do.

Note

1. His name was Leonardo; “da Vinci” is not his surname but a reference to the place were he was born, meaning “from Vinci.” So does the title of Dan Brown’s book mean that the code relates to the little town of Vinci?

Simulacra

Such images are frequently reported. If the depictions are of religious figures, they are sometimes popularly termed “apparitions” or “religious visions” (e.g., Virgin Mary 2003). However, they are quite different from the internalized viewings by “visionaries” which typically are unseen by ordinary folk. Rather, they are more or less visible to everyone, representing simply the ink-blot or picture-in-the-clouds effect: the mind’s tendency to “recognize” pictures in random patterns.

This tendency is known as pareidolia, a neurological/psychological phenomenon by which the brain interprets vague images as specific ones. These are known as simulacra (DeAngelis 1999; Novella 2001). Often the discerned image is a face because—as Carl Sagan (1995, 47) explained, “As soon as the infant can see, it recognizes faces, and we now know that this skill is hardwired to our brains.” As Sagan observed (1995, 46):

The most common image is the Man in the Moon. Of course, it doesn’t really look like a man. Its features are lopsided, warped, drooping. There’s a beefsteak or something over the left eye. And what expression does the mouth convey? An “O” of surprise? A hint of sadness, even lamentation? Doleful recognition of the traits of life on Earth? Certainly the face is too round. The ears are missing. I guess he’s bald on top. Nevertheless, every time I look at it, I see a human face.

Other secular simulacra include the “Face on Mars” (see Morrison 1988), as well as various shapes—a camel, butterfly, and a portrait of comedian Bob Hope—in a woman’s potato chip collection (Nickell 1998, 137). One famous granite formation, New Hampshire’s the Old Man of the Mountains profile, was a 700-ton, 1,200-foot-high simulacrum until it collapsed into rubble (Laughlin 2003).

Of course, simulacra can be faked. For example, suspect, crudely artistic images appeared repeatedly on the floor of a peasant woman’s home in Belmez de la Moraleda, Spain, in 1972 (Nickell 1998, 39). A large Christ portrait—looking amateurishly airbrushed, complete with a neat, oval-ringed halo— supposedly formed “miraculously” in 2000 on the wall of Palma Sola Presbyterian Church in Bradenton, Florida (Christ 2000). It appeared after workers used pressurized jets of water to clean the bricks. Deliberate simulacra hoaxing, however, seems rare.

Pious Imagination

Not surprisingly, a great number of reported simulacra are religious. For example, a Moslem girl in England reportedly found an Arabic message, “There is only one God” in the seed pattern of a sliced tomato (Message 1997).

Religious simulacra are perhaps most often associated with Catholic or Orthodox tradition, wherein there is a special emphasis on icons and other holy images. (Historically, what were perceived as excesses of image veneration were felt to represent idolatry, a violation of the commandment against graven images. Such objections led to the iconoclastic crisis in the Byzantine empire, 724—843 a.d., and were among the issues of the Protestant Reformation.) (Eliade 1995; Nickell 1997)

Today, theologians and clerics are usually quick to dismiss such images, one priest wisely attributing them to “pious imagination” (Nickell 1998, 34). However, they remain intensely popular among the superstitious faithful, and another priest, while warning against image worship, says more hopefully that simulacra created by nature “can provide us with a mirror into the transcendence of something larger than ourselves” (Cox 2001).

Images of Mary are especially prevalent, appearing in a splotch of tree fungus in Los Angeles, a fence post in Sydney, Australia, a tree stump and a refrigerator door in New Jersey, a mottled rust stain on a water heater in Arizona, a bedroom wall in Nova Scotia, the bark of an elm tree in Texas, and so on—as shown by clippings in my bulging “simulacra” file (e.g., Virgin Mary 2003). One of my favorites is the form of the Virgin of Guadalupe in spilled ice cream (Stack 2000).

Images of Jesus are also frequently perceived—for example, in the foliage of a vine-covered tree in West Virginia, in rust stains on a 40-foot-high soybean oil tank in Ohio, a grimy window in an Italian village, and in the discoloration of a San Antonio living-room ceiling, among numerous such examples. In 1995, television viewers saw the face of Jesus in a photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, showing stars being born in a gas cloud some six trillion miles long (Nickell 1997, 5). A Sacred-Heart figure of Jesus (as well as an Easter bunny) is outlined in the woodgrain pattern of my office door.

St. Bartholomew’s

Religious simulacra have been sighted since at least the third century a.d. (Rogo 1982, 113). In 1932, one “suddenly appeared” on a wall inside St. Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan (Hauck 1996).

Actually it was suddenly discerned. The rector of the Episcopal church, the Reverend Dr. Robert Norwood, had just concluded a Lenten sermon, titled “The Mystery of Incarnation.” As he stated:

. . . I happened to glance at the sanctuary wall and was amazed to see this lovely figure of Christ in the marble. I had never noticed it before. As it seemed to me to be an actual expression on the face of the marble of what I was preaching, “His Glorious Body,” I consider it a curious and beautiful happening. (Calkins 1982)

The figure was described as about one and a half feet tall, delineated in the variegations of the sepia marble directly above the door of the sanctuary. Armed with Rev. Norwood’s description, colleague Austin Dacey and I visited St. Bart’s in search of the image. Few there had heard of it except Becca Earley, who trains the church’s tour guides. She did not know the exact location, but over the years had discovered multiple simulacra—various faces and figures—in the sanctuary’s expanse of marble. She termed it “one enormous slab of Rorschachs” (Earley 2003).

Using the published description, we quickly found the image which—to the imagination—could seem to be that of a white-robed figure emerging from a tomb (figure 1). Seemingly unaware of the simulacra phenomenon, Rev. Norwood had told The New York Times (February 24, 1932): “How this Christ-like figure came to be there, of course, I don’t know. It is an illusion that grows before the vision. Has thought the power of life? People can scoff but the figure is there.”

Holy Tortilla

A classic of the simulacra genre was reported in 1978 at Lake Arthur, New Mexico. While Mrs. Maria Rubio was making burritos, she noticed the pattern of skillet burns on the tortilla. “It is Jesus Christ!” exclaimed the pious woman, and other family members agreed. After a priest reluctantly blessed the tortilla, she built a shrine for it, and thousands flocked from across the United States to witness the purported miracle and pray for divine assistance in curing ailments (Nickell 1998, 37).

In 1993, I appeared with Mrs. Rubio’s daughter (among others) on an Oprah program about miracles. The audience did not seem to take the young woman seriously and later she sat in the show’s green room looking, I thought, somewhat dejected. She brightened when I showed interest in her photos and invited me to visit her mother’s shrine.

A decade later, with colleague Vaughn Rees I did. The supposedly sacred object is displayed in a small outbuilding in Mrs. Rubio’s back yard. Alas, it is at best a former miracle, the image no longer being recognizable.

The Clearwater Virgin

Among the simulacra to get widespread and repeated media attention was one that appeared in late 1996 on the glass façade of a finance building in Clearwater, Florida. Composed of flowing lines that suggested the veiled head and shoulders of a faceless woman, the image was believed by the faithful to depict the Virgin Mary. It was curiously iridescent, its “rainbow colors” adding to the effect (Cox 2001).

Although never sanctioned by the local diocese, the image drew an estimated one million visitors over the next several years. The building was purchased by Shepherds of Christ Ministries—an Ohio-based Catholic revivalism group—and dubbed the Virgin Mary Building (Cox 2001). On March 1, 2004, the three uppermost panes of the window were discovered to have been broken by a vandal.1 Shortly thereafter (on March 20), while in the area to give a talk, I was able to visit the site with Dr. Gary Posner. He had investigated and tracked the Clearwater “miracle” claims and written a definitive article about them (Posner 1997).

A local chemist, Charles Roberts, had examined the window and drew on his forty years of experience in analyzing glass. He explained that the iridescent stain had been produced by water deposits combined with weathering, yielding a chemical reaction like that often seen on old bottles. “The culprit seems to be the sprinkler,” Roberts concluded (Norton 1996; Posner 1997).

Indeed, as I walked around the glass-faced building with Dr. Posner and another local skeptic, astronomy professor Jack H. Robinson, we could see that there were other iridescent flow patterns on windows, each at a sprinkler location. One, on the west wall, had been dubbed the “Buddha” (Posner 1997).

The Milton Madonna

In June 2003, thousands of pilgrims and sightseers were drawn to a hospital at Milton, Massachusetts, where an image appeared on a second-floor window. Most people envisioned it as Mary cradling the infant Jesus, but some thought she was standing among clouds while others saw her astride a globe or atop a mountain (Virgin vision 2003).

Figure 2. A “Madonna” appearing on the window of a hospital at Milton, Massachusetts, in June 2003 drew some 25,000 faithful in a single weekend. (Photos by Joe Nickell)

I briefly commented on the phenomenon on CNN (July 13). Before appearing on Boston television, and later on BBC radio (together with a church spokesman), I traveled to Milton to conduct an on-site investigation. I interviewed a hospital information officer (Schepici 2003), took photographs (figure 2), and talked with various pilgrims. I had seen no need to disguise my identity and indeed was soon recognized by one of the Catholic evangelicals with whom I discussed the phenomenon.

Various claims and rumors about the “Milton Madonna” were untrue. The discoloration did not suddenly appear; rather, it began five years earlier when the seal of the double-paned window broke, allowing moisture from the brickwork to mix with a moisture-absorbing sealant. (The window is behind a permanent partition and so could not be reached from the inside.) Nor was this the only such discolored window on the premises; one on the end of the building, bearing a cloudy shape some saw as a “fetus,” had earlier been replaced. A rumor that the replacement window cracked (as if in divine protest) was untrue. So was the notion—spread by anti-abortion zealots—that the “Madonna” image appeared in order to warn the hospital not to perform abortions; the facility actually lacks even an obstetrics unit (Heuer 2003; Schepici 2003).

Nevertheless, after an estimated 25,000 persons visited the site the first weekend, hospital officials issued a statement noting, “. . . a substantial safety issue has arisen that jeopardizes the ability of the Hospital to do its charitable work, to treat the sick and infirm” (Milton 2003). When devotees refused to heed the hospital’s request to limit viewing between 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., officials responded by covering the window with a tarp and only removing it during that period (Redd 2003). Subsequently, a “cross” was discovered on the hospital’s chimney, and other images were divined in nearby tree foliage.

Soon, however, attendance began to diminish, and a spokesman for the Boston Archdiocese, the Rev. Christopher Coyne, concluded that the phenomenon was neither a mystery nor a miracle (Heuer 2003). Indeed, that is true for all simulacra.

Note

1. A troubled teenager confessed to breaking the windows with slingshot-propelled ball bearings. He said he was expressing personal frustration, not acting out of any religious concerns; thus he was not charged with a hate crime (Tisch 2004).

References

• Calkins, Carroll, ed. 1982. Mysteries of the Unexplained. Pleasantville, N.Y.: The Reader’s Digest Association, 304.
• Christ image drawing faithful. 2000. Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville), May 3.
• Cox, Billy. 2001. Miraculous images give people hope. Florida Today, February 4.
• DeAngelis, Perry. 1999. Mother Mary comes to me. The New England Journal of Skepticism 2(4), Fall, 1, 13—15.
• Earley, Becca. 2003. Interview by Joe Nickell and Austin Dacey, October 10.
• Eliade, Mircea, ed. 1995. The Encyclopedia of Religion. New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan, vol. 7: “Iconoclasm” and “Icons.”
• Hauck, Dennis William. 1996. Haunted Places: The National Directory. New York: Penguin Books.
• Heuer, Max. 2003. Miracle, schmiracle: Church skeptical of Milton’s Mary. Bostonherald.com. . . , June 29.
• Laughlin, Larry. 2003. Old man’s loss heartfelt in New Hampshire. The Buffalo News, Mary 5.
• Milton Hospital Media Statement. 2003. June 16.
• Morrison, David. 1988. Seeing faces on Mars. Skeptical Inquirer 13(1), Fall, 76—80.
• Nickell, Joe. 1997. Those tearful icons. Free Inquiry 17(2), Spring: 5, 7, 61.
• —. 1998. Looking for a Miracle: Weeping Icons, Relics, Stigmata, Visions and Healing Cures. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
• Norton, Wilma. 1996. Science tests Madonna of windows. St. Petersburg Times, undated clipping.
• Novella, Robert. 2001. Believing is seeing. The New England Journal of Skepticism 4(1), Winter, 1, 16—17.
• Posner, Gary P. 1997. Tampa Bay’s “Virgin Mary apparition.” Free Inquiry Spring, 4, 6.
• Redd, C. Kalimah. 2003. Milton Hospital puts Virgin Mary under wraps; www.globe.com . . . , June 20.
• Rogo, D. Scott. 1982. Miracles: A Parascientific Inquiry into Wondrous Phenomena. New York: Dial Press.
• Sagan, Carl. 1995. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Random House.
• Schepici, Susan. 2003. Interview by Joe Nickell, July 7.
• Stack, Megan K. 2000. Virgin seen in spilled ice cream. Associated Press, January 14.
• Tisch, Chris. 2004. Teen held in Virgin Mary smashing. www.sptimes.com . . . , May 12.
• Virgin Mary hits Sydney beach again. 2003. The Age, February 2. Available at www.theage.com . . . ; accessed February 3, 2003.
• Virgin vision in glass. 2003. Fortean Times 174 (October), 5.

Is science making us more ignorant? Surely, scientific knowledge is increasing. In a year, we will know more, and in richer detail, about the universe than we do now. In one sense, the scientific ignorance of laypeople increases with each increase in specialists’ knowledge, since most laypeople can’t keep abreast of advancing science. But even if everyone were scientifically informed, that would not keep us from being ignorant in the following sense. We still might be lost, in that we might not have a reasonable grasp of basic issues like these: What are we? Why are we here? How are we related to nature? Why is this world here rather than some other world or “nothing at all?” What can we know? What can we hope for? A person who could recite the periodic table and explain the difference between introns and exons but who had nothing to say on questions like these would be out to sea intellectually.

Throughout most of human history, people have gotten a handle on such questions by way of common sense, religion, philosophy, literature and art, educational and civil institutions, and assumptions embedded in natural language itself—in short, by way of their culture. Of course, a single culture might contain many, sometimes conflicting, answers. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as a cultural understanding of our basic outlook on the world and our place in it.

Today, this understanding is being unsettled. Emerging science clearly speaks to central cultural questions, but precisely what it says is unclear. This is an opportunity for a new line of inquiry, rooted in a new multidisciplinary academic field with tremendous intellectual and social significance. It could help point the way to renewed support for publicly funded basic research and decide what sort of “science literacy” matters most.

The Loss of Cultural Understanding

Consider the question of what we are. One way to approach this question is through a complex of cultural beliefs about the self; for instance, that it is a coherent, unitary entity, mostly transparent to introspection, which authors behavior by the free directives of its will. Now, neuroscience is probing the brain and behavior and discovering some startling facts. By observing electrical activity around your hippocampus on a computer screen, others can predict more accurately than you can whether you will successfully recall the name of a person you just met. Meanwhile, the neural activity associated with a choice appears to precede your conscious experience of that choice. This is just the beginning. Do these facts contradict the received cultural understanding of the self? Do they reinforce it? Or are they not facts about the self at all but about something else? I don’t know. I’m not sure that anyone does at this point.

And that is how science is making us more ignorant. Before neuroscience, the received cultural understanding of the self was reasonable because it was favored by the balance of the total evidence available to us. That evidence included our own introspection, along with the cultural sources just mentioned. We had an idea of what was going on with the self. With the advent of neuroscience, the total evidence available to us came to include the results of the investigations of that field. Yet we don’t know what this expanded set of evidence should lead us to conclude with respect to our cultural beliefs about the self. Thus, we have become more ignorant about the self. The point is not that some people don’t yet understand the latest relevant science. Rather, the latest science makes it the case that we no longer understand what we once did about the self. A similar case can be made for each of the basic cultural questions mentioned above.

Someone skeptical about the reach of science might reply that neuroscience research is not a proper part of the total evidence relevant to understanding the self. However, such research clearly appears relevant. Maybe the appearance is misleading, but no one has established that it is. Until this is established, basic pieces of culture remain up for grabs. In a prescientific environment, we could discharge our epistemic duties with respect to our cultural beliefs without thinking about science. To do that now would be to ignore a part of the total evidence relevant to those beliefs. And that would be ignorant.

A New Field of Inquiry

The positive way to say that science is making us more ignorant is to say that it is opening up a new field of inquiry. There are different ways to frame this field. For reasons that will emerge below, I frame it as “science and the public.” I see it as having philosophical and empirical-sociological aspects. The philosophical aim is to articulate the relationships (logical, conceptual, epistemological, normative) that hold between emerging scientific knowledge and basic cultural beliefs and values. The empirical-sociological aim is to examine how these relationships play out in the interactions of actual participants in the culture, namely, institutions of science and technology and the public. We are familiar with the idea that science has technological and medical applications. But it also has cultural applications. The field of science and the public can also be thought of as the study of the cultural applications of science.

The general idea of bridging science and culture is nothing new. However, the present notion of science and the public is distinctive. Perhaps the two thinkers who loom the largest in this area are C.P. Snow and E.O. Wilson. In a now-famous, 1959 lecture, Snow decried the gulf between the “two cultures,” with literary intellectuals and artists on the one side and scientists and technologists on the other. [1] He was worried that academics were not talking to each other across these disciplinary fences. Snow was right to be concerned, and his concerns remain timely today. We can go further than Snow, however. Basic cultural understanding, common to literary and scientific types alike, is being upended by the growth of science. Reconstructing it will require the cross-disciplinary work of scholars in the sciences and the humanities.

The contemporary scientific outlook is widely presumed to be materialist or physicalist, in that all properties and relations in the universe (or universes) are thought to depend in some way on the fundamental wave-particles and forces postulated by physical theory. This presents a problem, for there are plenty of things in the world that we regard as real—intentions, promises, jealousy, friends, toll roads, federal constitutions, and so forth—yet they appear in no physical theory. What are we to make of them? That is, how are we to systematically relate our commonsense and cultural ontologies to physicalist ontologies? One solution is so-called intertheoretic reduction: “higher-order” entities are “nothing but” agglomerations of “lower-order” entities, and the laws governing the former can be deduced from the laws governing the latter. This was the bold agenda championed by E.O. Wilson under the banner of consilience, the idea that “all tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics.” [2]

Unfortunately for Wilson, this reductionist program has long since been abandoned because of insurmountable technical obstacles, even in the case of reducing biology to chemistry. [3] Reductionism is dead, whereas nonreductive integration is very much alive. [4] Throughout the fields of philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, even theology, researchers are attempting to systematically relate their subject matter to the ontologies emerging from the natural sciences. The field of science and the public would draw these disparate research projects together, offering a coherent overview (inasmuch as the overview turns out to be coherent).

The Role of Academia

To date, there are no major academic institutions devoted to studying the cultural applications of science. Traditional training in formal-science teaching tends to focus, quite appropriately, on science as a body of knowledge or set of methods. In the U.S. and in the United Kingdom especially, there are also thriving academic programs in the field known as “science communication” or “public understanding of science,” for instance, the programs at Cornell University and the London School of Economics. These programs typically consist of sociological examination of the public’s experience of science, especially as mediated by mass communication. Programs in the history of science and technology, such as the initiative at MIT, look at the social repercussions of science and technology over time. None are primarily concerned with the intellectual and normative connections linking the scientific outlook with cultural beliefs and values. Many analytic philosophers are taking naturalistic, scientifically informed approaches to semantics, the mind, morality, and other issues. The task of synthesizing these independent lines of inquiry has for the most part been left to others.

A new interdisciplinary academic field is needed. The Center for Inquiry, a nonprofit research organization concerned with the scientific outlook, is collaborating with the University at Buffalo on a program in Science and the Public, which will initially include research and an interdisciplinary Master’s degree. [5] The program is being designed to attract scholars in the sciences and humanities, as well as educators, policy makers, and journalists who seek a new language and framework in which to discuss the intersections of science and culture.

The subject of science and the public is related to, but distinct from, the subject of public science literacy. Scholars and policy experts continue to disagree about what kind of science literacy is desirable and how to promote it. [6] Not even scientists and science educators, much less laypeople, have a comprehensive grasp of the fundamental principles and findings of all fields of contemporary science. [7] It may well be that the findings are just too numerous and complex, and the principles too nongeneralizable; there is simply more scientific knowledge than even a reasonably intelligent and well-educated person could become competent in (and there is good inductive evidence that this situation will continue into the foreseeable future). As a workable alternative to this ideal of science literacy, we might look toward the public’s appreciation of the scientific outlook’s import for basic cultural beliefs and values. Further, one of the things that most disturbs science educators, especially in the U.S., is the high level of public belief in pseudoscience, the paranormal, and the supernatural: ghosts, demons, reincarnation, creationism, psychic abilities, and so on. Yet no one has successfully demonstrated that traditional education in science tends to reduce such beliefs generally. [8] With its focus on cultural implications, the science and the public approach engages them directly.

Leading colleges and universities may be beginning to rethink the place of science education in their core undergraduate curricula. The 2004 Harvard College Curricular Review by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences noted: “. . . our undergraduates will live in a world of ongoing scientific and technological revolution. We are revising our understanding of the biological infrastructure of life, and challenging conceptions of human nature and of our physical universe. . . . We must prepare not only science concentrators but also those students more interested in the humanities and social sciences to grapple with the scientific and technological elements of the public policy issues and ethical questions that will arise in their lifetimes.” [9]

The Review concluded that students should grasp the foundational principles, methods, and institutional culture of the sciences; broad-based survey courses alone are insufficient. A reinvigoration of science’s role in a liberal-arts curriculum, of the kind being considered by Harvard, will benefit from serious reflection on the relationships between science and culture. It is precisely this reflection, I am arguing, that deserves a specially dedicated academic effort.

The Search for a New Public Science Policy

Aside from its intrinsic interest, the field of science and the public could play an important role in securing public support for science. The architects of twentieth-century American science policy saw that basic scientific research would require public—i.e., governmental—support. The received policy dates to the closing years of World War II, when leading scientists sought to continue the partnerships between academic, business, and military communities that had been forged during wartime. In 1945, President Roosevelt commissioned a report that would come to structure American science policy for the next fifty years. Science: The Endless Frontier, authored by Carnegie Institution president and electrical engineer Vannenar Bush, made the case for securing government funding for “basic research” (by which he meant research guided by theoretical rather than practical considerations) while relaxing wartime controls and security constraints. The report led to the creation of the National Science Foundation five years later. [10]

The received science policy served the country’s national interests throughout the eras of Sputnik and the H-bomb. It also made the United States the world’s leading contributor to the global commons of scientific information, an enormous wealth of data that are copyright-free and open to all for further study and applications. Throughout most of the history of the U.S., a liberal regime of copyright law reinforced the scientific ethos of information sharing. Data as such were not eligible for copyright protection and immediately entered the public domain upon publication. Other researchers could protect specific scientific publications that used or compiled the data, while the data itself remained non-copyrightable, along with any “idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle or discovery” found in a scientific work. [11]

This legal infrastructure has come under stress at several points. The commercialization of biochemistry by the pharmaceutical industry is the most pressing. Corporate-funded researchers bury the results of clinical trials when they are found to be unfavorable to their sponsors, depriving public science of crucial data. [12] Drug companies block cheap generics desperately needed in the developing world, insisting on an inflexible intellectual-property system in the face of a staggering humanitarian toll.

Less noticeably, the proportion of government-funded to private-funded research and development has fallen from a high of sixty-seven percent in the 1960s to twenty-six percent in 2000. The universities, traditional centers for the production of public basic science, are especially vulnerable to financial pressures. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 encouraged schools to commercialize the applications of research, even when it is federally funded. Some observers see funding “shifting from military-related physics and chemistry to commercially oriented molecular biology applications, chiefly for agricultural and drug corporations. In many leading universities, a new pharmaceutical-corporate complex is slowly displacing the older military-industrial complex. . . .” [13]

Meanwhile, with the rise in digital media for disseminating information, have come new opportunities to own and control it. Under the 1996 European Union Database Directive and similar proposals put forward in the U. S., the maker of a database is granted a new sui generis property right to all the information it contains. In general, when information is accessed via computer software, the creators of that software have the power to limit access even when such access would be permitted by the copyright. In this digital environment, copyright holders’ controls can easily outpace their permissions. [14]

Where Vannenar Bush feared the meddling fingers of short-sighted bureaucrats, today, it is the market’s invisible hands that are bending science into a narrowly utilitarian shape. Surely, any sensible knowledge economy must provide incentives to private interests to invest in innovative science and technology. But these incentives must be weighed against the great public interest in free and open basic science. Its flourishing will require a new commitment of public support, a new contract between science and society. [15]

As the Cold War did a generation ago, an open-ended “war on terrorism” might justify federal spending on certain fields, such as bioinformatics—but what of evolutionary ecology or neurobiology? [16] Practical arguments for noncommercial applications might support investment in some sciences, such as climatology—but what of cosmology or theoretical physics? Here the cultural applications of science may help point the way to a post-Cold War defense of publicly funded basic research. The cultural project of self-discovery, once carried out in the solitary introspections of a Descartes or Luther, now animates research programs enlisting dozens or hundreds of people and resources from around the globe. In an age of science, cultural knowledge isn’t cheap. And like knowledge in general, it is a public good. In the terms of economic theory, its use is non-rivalrous—once the good has been produced, the marginal cost of providing it to each additional user tends to be low to zero—and it is non-excludable—preventing anyone from using the good without preventing all is impracticable or impossible. [17] Like other public goods, knowledge invites “free riders,” making it unattractive to private investors seeking financial returns. Citizens who care about basic cultural knowledge should care about public investment in fundamental science.

Conclusion

Science doesn’t shed only light. It also casts shadows, splintering the “clear and distinct ideas” of Cartesian intuition and the “inner light” of conscience into a thousand variegated shades. If we look carefully into this dappled array, we can make out the beginnings of a new cultural understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. To make sense of it, we will need a field of inquiry that examines the intersection of the scientific outlook with fundamental cultural beliefs and values. Attention to science and the public could also help refocus the debate over science literacy and motivate public support for basic research in the post-Cold War era.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Camilla Dacey-Groth, Elizabeth Harman, Paul Kurtz, and Christopher Whittle for their comments.

Notes

• Snow, C.P. 1959. The Two Cultures: A Second Look. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wilson, Edward O. 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: David A. Knopf, Inc. 266 (see also 11 and 55).
• Bickle, John. 2002. Philosophy of mind and the neurosciences. In Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, Ted Warfield, and Stephen Stich, eds. New York: Blackwell Publishing: 322—351; Kitcher, Philip. 1984. 1953 and all that: A tale of two sciences. Philosophical Review 1984: 335—373; Nickles, Thomas. 1973. Two concepts of intertheoretic reduction. Journal of Philosophy 70: 181—201; Rosenberg, Alexander. 1994. Instrumental Biology, or The Disunity of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• In the contemporary philosophical literature, this enterprise is proceeding via the concept of “supervenience.”
• Available at www.scienceandthepublic.org.
• Shamos, M.H. 1995. The Myth of Scientific Literacy. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press; Miller, J.D. 1998. The measurement of civic scientific literacy, Public Understanding of Science 7: 203—223.
• Showers, Dennis. 1993. An examination of the science literacy of scientists and science educators. ERIC document ED 362 393. From a paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, Atlanta, Georgia.
• Some paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs are actually more common among better educated Americans. See Losh, Susan Carol, et al. 2003. What does education really do? Educational dimensions and pseudoscience support in the American general public, 1979—2001. Skeptical Inquirer 27(5), September/October: 30—35.
• See Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Science. 2004. A Report on the Harvard College Curricular Review. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University. 8—9; and Rimer, Sara. 2004. Committee urges Harvard to expand the reach of its undergraduate curriculum. New York Times. April 27: A19.
• Bush, Vannevar. 1990 [1950]. Science: The Endless Frontier. Washington, D.C.: The National Science Foundation.
• Reichman, J.H., and Paul F. Uhlir. 2003. A contractually reconstructed research commons for scientific data in a highly protectionist intellectual property environment. Law & Contemporary Problems 66(1&2): 315—462. See also David, Paul A. A tragedy of the public knowledge “commons”? Global science, intellectual property and the digital technology boomerang. For historical insight on America’s handling of intellectual property, see Ben-Atar, Doron S. 2004. Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
• Meier, Barry. 2004. Medical journals weigh plan for full drug-trial disclosure. New York Times. June 15.
• Aronowitz, Stanley. 2000. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press.
• Lessig, Lawrence. 2004. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin Press. 157.
• The late Congressman George E. Brown, Jr., was a vocal advocate of such a rethinking. See his 1998 public statement Unlocking the Future: Report of the House Science Committee Science Policy Study. Washington, D.C. September 24. The complete report is available at www.house.gov.
• With the increase in transnational scientific ventures and the rise of Europe and Asia as centers of innovation, Cold War motives of nationalistic competition are losing their relevance. See Broad, William J. 2004. U.S. is losing its dominance in the sciences. New York Times. May 3.
• For technical reasons, some economists classify knowledge as quasi-public.

In the September/October 2003 Skeptical Inquirer, I wrote an article critical of the research agenda of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) (Atwood 2003). Subsequently, reader Myra Jones argued in a letter to the editor that “we as skeptics should not throw the baby out with the bath water. Just because the NCCAM has funded bad science doesn’t mean that . . . some alternative medicine might not have valid claims. Many practices now accepted were once thought crazy by the medical mainstream” (Jones 2004). Part of my reply to her was this: “For example, which practices? Initial skepticism of any new claim is an appropriate part of the scientific approach. . . . Other than that, I challenge Ms. Jones to name a single example, since the era of scientific medicine began in the second half of the nineteenth century, of a correct claim that faced dogmatic, closed-minded rejection by the ‘medical mainstream’ for any significant amount of time” (Atwood 2004).

Be careful what you ask for. A few weeks later, the editors received this letter from Dr. Tess Gerritsen:

As a physician, a long-time skeptic, and a member of CSICOP, I’m happy to agree with most of Dr. Atwood’s points about alternative medicine. However, when he challenged letter writer Myra Jones to come up with a “a single example, since the era of scientific medicine began in the second half of the nineteenth century, of a correct claim that faced dogmatic, closed-minded rejection by the ‘medical mainstream’ for any significant amount of time,” I must respond in Ms. Jones’s defense.

When I was first starting out in medical practice, back in the early 1980s, the accepted treatment for peptic ulcer disease was a bland diet plus antacids and more antacids. Later, histamine H2-receptor antagonists were added to the treatment. But that was it, case closed.

Then, in 1984, physicians Warren and Marshall from Australia claimed that peptic ulcer disease was not caused merely by overproduction of gastric acid, but rather by a specific bacterium: Helicobacter pylori, to be specific. They recommended antibiotic therapy. Believe me, they were ridiculed by the medical establishment. I recall my colleagues, and even my own physician-husband, scoffing at the idea of peptic ulcers being an infectious disease. For the next thirteen years, most of the “medical mainstream” refused to let go of their calcified notion that the only treatment for ulcers was to combat gastric acid secretion. After all, that was what we all learned in medical school. Therefore, it had to be the truth!

It wasn’t until 1997 that the CDC finally put out the word to the nation’s doctors: Drs. Warren and Marshall had been correct all along. Helicobacter pylori was, indeed, the cause of most cases of peptic ulcer disease. The treatment, at long last accepted by mainstream medicine, is now antibiotics.

This is only one example; I’m sure my physician colleagues can think of others. This is a case where skepticism (my own and that of others) delayed the use of effective ulcer treatment for over a decade. I think Ms. Jones’s warning that we “not throw out the baby with the bath water” is indeed a good one. Skepticism is good and healthy, but at its extreme, it can turn into rigid closed-mindedness.

This is an oft-heard argument. Ms. Jones, in response to my challenge, offered the same example in a private e-mail to SI editor Kendrick Frazier. “CAM” supporters brought it up a couple of years ago at a meeting of the Massachusetts Special Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medical Practitioners, of which I was a member. At least one recent article in a mainstream medical journal has made the same claim, without attribution (Kaptchuk 2003). Medicine’s purported ostracism of the discovery of H. pylori—to some extent, as we shall see, fostered by one of its discoverers—has achieved a mythical quality.

But it isn’t true. I have no reason to doubt that many physicians scoffed when first faced with the notion of a bacterial basis for peptic ulcer disease (PUD). It is not the case, however, that the medical mainstream dogmatically rejected the proposal for an undue period of time. A brief history shows that the hypothesis was accepted right on schedule, but only after “appropriate initial skepticism”—the premise of my challenge—was satisfactorily answered. Some of the other particulars of the mythical version of the story are also incorrect.

Before proceeding, I would like to reiterate another point made in the context of the challenge: all biomedical proposals, “CAM” or otherwise, can only be judged according to what is known about nature. The warning that by refusing to commit scarce resources to the investigation of implausible claims, we risk “throwing the baby out with the bath water,” implies that we have little basis for deciding which claims merit further investigation. But that isn’t true, either.

Background

Search performed at PubMed using the search terms campylobacter pylori or campylobacter pyloridis or campylobacter pyloric or campylobacter-like or helicobacter pylori or curved bacilli gastric. The 1982 and one of the 1983 citations had to do with animal studies.

Medical researchers Robin Warren and Barry Marshall first reported the curious finding of “unidentified curved bacilli on gastric epithelium in active chronic gastritis” (not ulcer) in two letters to the British journal Lancet, published on June 4, 1983. They noted that similar bacteria had been described intermittently, possibly as early as the nineteenth century and certainly since 1938, but that these had never been cultured and their significance was unknown. They explained that the bacteria cannot be seen with usual staining methods and surmised that this is why they had typically been overlooked. They reported that the bacteria are found beneath gastric mucus, thus possibly explaining how they might be protected from gastric acid. They noted that similar bacteria had been described in other mammals and were thought to be “commensals”—harmless inhabitants of the gastric mucosa (stomach epithelium). Nevertheless, because Dr. Warren had found the bacteria in biopsy specimens of inflamed gastric mucosa but not in normal ones, Dr. Marshall cautiously suggested, “If these bacteria are truly associated with gastritis . . . they may have a part to play in other poorly understood, gastritis associated diseases (i.e., peptic ulcer and gastric cancer)” (Warren and Marshall 1983).

One year later, in the June 16, 1984, Lancet, Marshall and Warren published their first full paper on the topic. They further characterized the bacterium, reported its first successful culture, and established that it was a new species of unclear relation to any previously characterized. At that time, they and others were still referring to it as a form of campylobacter—variously called C. pyloridis or C. pylori—because of morphologic similarities with other campylobacter species, but Marshall and Warren recognized that there were important differences. These differences eventually led to it being renamed Helicobacter pylori.

The authors reaffirmed the association of the bacterium with gastritis, but they now also reported it in association with both gastric and duodenal ulcers. Nevertheless, they remained cautious: “Although cause and effect cannot be proved in a study of this kind, we believe that pyloric campylobacter is etiologically related to chronic antral gastritis and, probably, to peptic ulceration also” (Marshall and Warren 1984). They did not recommend antibiotic treatment but reported that bismuth—an established treatment for PUD when coupled with acid suppression, that seemed to be associated with reduced relapse rates compared to acid suppression alone—was bactericidal to the new “pyloric campylobacter.” A bacterial cause of PUD, they suggested, could thus explain the finding of a reduced incidence of relapse in patients treated with bismuth. All of this was plausible but, of course, still new and unproved.

The Initial Response of Investigative Medicine

For Marshall and Warren’s proposal to gain scientific and clinical momentum, several requirements had to be met: others had to confirm both the bacteriologic and clinical findings; stronger evidence than mere “bystander” status for an etiologic (causative) role of the bacteria in PUD had to be offered and replicated; diagnostic methods less cumbersome and expensive than endoscopy, biopsy, and culture—the methods used by Warren and Marshall—had to be developed; and antibacterial treatment had to be shown to be more useful—i.e., as safe as but more effective than—standard treatments. The last requirement was not trivial, as I will discuss. All these steps would take time.

One might expect that if scientific medicine had dogmatically rejected Warren and Marshall’s hypothesis, there would be scant references to their reports for the several years after the initial publications. The opposite is the case: the biomedical world was abuzz with Campylobacter pylori from the start, as is demonstrated in the figure. It shows the number of papers listed on PubMed, the online database of the National Library of Medicine, as a function of the calendar year throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. The rate of increase after 1983 is nearly exponential. Anyone who doubts the infatuation that medicine had with C. pylori at the time can surf to PubMed and, using the same search criteria that I used to generate the data for the figure, peruse thousands of abstracts.

Within a couple of years of the original report, numerous groups searched for, and most found, the same organism. Bacteriologists were giddy over the discovery of a new species. By 1987—virtually overnight, on the timescale of medical science—reports from all over the world, including Africa, the Soviet Union, China, Peru, and elsewhere, had confirmed the finding of this bacterium in association with gastritis and, to a lesser extent, ulcers. Simpler and less invasive diagnostic methods were devised (Graham et al. 1987; Evans et al. 1989). The possibility of pyloric campylobacter being the cause of gastritis or ulcers was exciting and vigorously discussed, even as it was acknowledged by all, including Marshall and Warren, to require more evidence. Here is a typical opinion, in this instance from the Netherlands: “There is an explosion of interest in the role of Campylobacter pylori as a cause of active chronic gastritis. . . . To what extent this intriguing microorganism is causally related to peptic ulcer disease remains to be elucidated, but all the evidence which is available so far supports a pathogenetically important role” (Tytgat and Rauws 1987).

The New England Journal of Medicine, the most widely read medical journal in the world, offered this editorial: “Further unfolding of the details [of the possible etiologic role of C. pylori in peptic ulcer disease] will be enhanced by the development of an animal model, by epidemiologic studies, and by identification of the source and the virulence properties of specific serotypes of C. pylori. The prospects are exciting, intriguing, and promising” (Hornick 1987).

The Quest for Proof of Cause

Establishing that a microbe is the cause of a specific disease is not a simple task. The mere presence of microorganisms, even if reliably found in association with diseased tissue, does not prove that the organism causes the disease. Myriad species of bacteria and fungi are always present in the human large intestine, for example, but most never cause diseases. Thus, there must be specific evidence of cause and effect.

The accepted standard for establishing such a causal relation was offered by Robert Koch in 1882, during the flowering of the Germ Theory of disease. As described in his classic lecture “Die Aetiologie der Tuberkulose,” Koch established the bacterial cause of tuberculosis by the following steps:

1. He harvested, from post-mortem specimens of human lung and brain tissues taken from patients who had died of tuberculosis, a characteristic bacterium with identical microscopic features in every case.
2. He grew these bacteria by placing specimens of diseased tissue onto appropriate solid-culture media. Solid-culture media, one of Koch’s most important innovations, allowed him to discern discrete colonies of bacteria, for the first time providing a method of isolating pure cultures. By serially reintroducing bacteria from these colonies onto new media, he achieved pure cultures of bacteria identical to those originally found but without any possibility of contamination from the original sample. The bacterial progeny manifested the same microscopic features as those he had originally found.
3. When he introduced these offspring into guinea pigs, the result was the characteristic disease of tuberculosis (the guinea-pig variety).
4. He then recovered the identical organism from the diseased guinea-pig tissues (Koch 1882).

These steps became known as “Koch’s postulates” and resulted, over the next twenty years, in the elucidation of most bacterial and parasitic diseases that had afflicted humankind during historical memory. It would have been more certain for investigators to reintroduce the pure cultures into humans instead of nonhuman animals, because one could not know that all infectious diseases in humans have susceptible hosts in the animal world; and as subsequently has become clear, they don’t. For obvious reasons, this has not usually been done.

Part of the problem for C. pylori was that for several years after Marshall and Warren had first cultured it, there was no good animal model. Thus efforts to satisfy Koch’s postulates were hampered. Fortunately, much had changed since Koch’s time, such that a presumption of a microbial cause of a disease could now be based on additional evidence: specific immune responses to the organism, an elucidation of microbial pathogenesis at the tissue and molecular levels, response to specific treatment, and more. An important difference between the H. pylori story and what Koch faced is that there were now effective treatments for bacterial diseases, unavailable in Koch’s time. Thus a “proof in the pudding” was possible. That eventually became the clincher for H. pylori.

Another difference is that unlike anthrax, TB, pneumococcal pneumonia, bubonic plague, malaria, cholera, and other dreaded microbial diseases investigated by Koch and others near the end of the nineteenth century, presumptive H. pylori gastritis or even peptic-ulcer disease is not particularly dangerous. It was also eminently treatable in the 1980s even without antibiotics and prior to any knowledge of H. pylori—a point that belies any argument that a delay in accepting the bacterial hypothesis caused widespread, unnecessary suffering.

The relatively indolent nature of presumptive H. pylori disease led some investigators to attempt to demonstrate cause by the most direct of means. In the 1985 article “Attempt to fulfill Koch’s postulates for pyloric Campylobacter,” Marshall and colleagues reported that a normal volunteer had swallowed a pure culture of the organism. The result was “ . . . a mild illness . . . which lasted fourteen days. Histologically proven gastritis was present on the tenth day after the ingestion of bacteria, but this had largely resolved by the fourteenth day. The syndrome of acute pyloric campylobacter gastritis is described” (Marshall et al. 1985).

This constituted highly suggestive evidence that the organism caused gastritis. But it was far from conclusive, because it involved a single subject and was reported by the very author most wedded to the hypothesis. Thus, replication by others would have been required. Perhaps more important was that the subject, who was none other than Marshall himself, failed to develop an ulcer. Note also that the disease resolved without treatment.

As unlikely as it may seem, such a human demonstration was twice repeated with similar results. As late as 1995, Marshall himself reviewed these studies and conceded that Koch’s postulates, still the “gold standard” for demonstrating a microbial cause of a disease, had not been fulfilled for H. pylori and peptic-ulcer disease (Marshall 1995).

Persuasive Evidence for Etiology and Treatment

What ultimately convinced the medical world was not this sort of experiment but one that took advantage of the existence of effective antibacterial agents. To introduce the history of this effort, it is necessary to consider the setting in which it was done. As mentioned, there were already highly effective treatments for PUD by the early 1980s. The rate of complete healing of endoscopy-proven duodenal ulcers, after several weeks of treatment with potent inhibitors of acid production, is about 95 percent (Straus 1996). Symptomatic relief occurs within a couple of weeks (McFarland et al. 1990). Such treatment, moreover, is remarkably safe and free of side effects. The same cannot be said for metronidazole, the first widely used antibiotic for H. pylori. This and other proposed antibiotic treatments for H. pylori have unquestioned side effects, some of which mimic the symptoms of the very disease for which they are prescribed. These can pose significant disincentives for patients who would like to feel better. The selection of strains of H. pylori that are resistant to antibiotics, moreover, was reported in the very first large trial of their use. Does any of this sound promising for such a treatment?

I’m playing the devil’s advocate. I am a firm believer in the H. pylori hypothesis, and if I had a duodenal ulcer, I would take metronidazole in a heartbeat. This was far from obvious throughout the 1980s, however, not because of dogmatic rejection, but for legitimate scientific and medical reasons. To summarize: Even by the end of the decade, it was not clear either that H. pylori caused PUD or, if it did, that specific antibacterial treatment would be preferable to existing treatments.

What finally convinced doubters of both cause and treatment was something that by its very nature took several years to establish. The initial treatment of peptic-ulcer disease was not the problem. The problem was relapse. In patients whose ulcers have completely healed after treatment with acid-suppression only, 50—95 percent will recur within two years, although the percentage is much lower if acid suppression is continued indefinitely (Gough et al. 1984). We now know that if temporary acid suppression is coupled with eradication of H. pylori, the recurrence rate drops to 5—10 percent.

But consider the time required to complete a trial that could establish this fact. The trial alone requires following about 100 patients for many months (twelve to twenty-four, typically), because ulcer recurrence is the issue. Patient accrual in any clinical trial is not instantaneous but usually occurs over several months or more, and the trial is not complete until the last patient entered has been followed for the planned period. This time is in addition to the usual time required for planning, applying for and receiving grant money, applying for and obtaining human-studies approval, overcoming unforeseen technical obstacles, writing the paper, waiting for a response after submitting it to a journal, revising it based on reviewers’ recommendations, revising it again based on copy editors’ recommendations, and waiting for ultimate publication. Thus, the least amount of time for such a project to proceed from inception to publication is about four years.

The first trial that was both large enough and rigorous enough to be noticed was conceived by Marshall and Warren in 1984 and published in Lancet at the very end of 1988 (Marshall et al. 1988). It had followed 100 patients for twelve months. The authors reported that the recurrence rate of duodenal ulcer was much lower in patients whose H. pylori were eradicated than in those whose bacteria were not, but there were problems. Such eradication occurred only when the antibiotic tinidazole was combined with bismuth. When tinidazole was given alone, resistant H. pylori strains invariably thrived. The authors also reported more unpleasant side effects, including diarrhea, in the groups that took the antibiotic. Thus the results were highly suggestive that eradicating H. pylori could prevent ulcer recurrence, but somewhat less suggestive that this could be done effectively in the long run with minimal side effects. Since the authors were the original proponents of the bacterial hypothesis, moreover, any firm conclusions would first require confirmation by others. This was not ostracism; it was appropriate scientific skepticism.

By early 1992, at least three more studies had been published that, in the aggregate, convinced the academic medical world of the causative nature of H. pylori in PUD. The trial portion of the last and most influential of these was already underway by September 1988, well before Marshall and Warren’s paper was published—further demonstrating the commitment of medical scientists to investigate the hypothesis. This study followed 109 patients for two years, using a triple-antibacterial regimen that was far more effective than that reported by Marshall and Warren. It found, unequivocally, that the recurrence rate of both gastric and duodenal ulcer was far lower in patients whose H. pylori had been eradicated. Antibiotic resistance was not apparent because of the triple-drug regimen, and side effects were tolerable (Graham et al. 1992).

This study, according to Lawrence S. Friedman, chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine Subspecialty Board on Gastroenterology, opened the floodgates in the United States. “After that everyone accepted the causative role of H. pylori, and everyone, at least among gastroenterologists, treated PUD with antibacterials.” According to Dr. Friedman, this was done for duodenal ulcer [DU] even in the absence of specific proof that the patient harbored the organism: “Early on (early 1990s) all patients with duodenal ulcer were assumed to have H. pylori; the presence of a DU was justification for treatment of HP, though in practice many physicians still tested for the organism (at endoscopy and to some extent by serology)” (Lawrence Friedman, personal communication).

In case there were still pockets of resistance to the H. pylori argument, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) convened a Consensus Conference in February 1994. Marshall was a member of the planning committee. The proceedings were published the following July in the Journal of the American Medical Association (NIH Consensus Conference 1994). The report strongly supported the causative role of H. pylori in peptic ulcer disease, and unequivocally recommended triple antibacterial treatment for patients with ulcers and H. pylori. It also enthusiastically supported further research on the organism and its potential role in cancer of the stomach.

How to Explain the Myth?

That, then, is the history of the H. pylori hypothesis and its acceptance by the medical mainstream. Its journey from proposal to acceptance was quite ordinary. The first reports were surprising but intriguing and entirely plausible. The potential implications didn’t require a “new paradigm,” just a little work. Other investigators quickly jumped on the research bandwagon, and in a matter of a few years, the basic story and its therapeutic ramifications were established. The profession, as represented by its literature and institutions, readily accepted it. The entire process took about eight years—ten, if one insists on including the NIH coming-out party (I don’t), but not the thirteen that has been claimed. This amount of time was entirely appropriate, given the nature of the task.

So why the myth? I don’t know how it started, but there are a couple of clues. Dr. Gerritsen refers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “putting out the word” in 1997. Is it possible that she is remembering the NIH Consensus Conference but got the date wrong? Probably not, because the CDC is not the NIH, and the CDC did publish a report on the topic in 1997. The word that it put out, however, was not “to the nation’s doctors that . . . Helicobacter pylori was, indeed, the cause of most cases of peptic ulcer disease.” On the contrary, it reported that national surveys in 1994 and 1996 had found that 90 percent of primary-care physicians and gastroenterologists in the U.S. already “identified H. pylori as the primary cause of PUD.” The actual point of the article was to show that “only 27 percent of the general public [emphasis added] is aware of the association between H. pylori infection and PUD” (CDC 1997). Ironically, 60 percent of the general public still thought that the cause was “stress,” a vague, whimsical, and mildly insulting “mind-body” hypothesis that medicine hadn’t taken seriously for at least a generation.

To be fair, I will add that the CDC report also mentioned that although most physicians were aware of the H. pylori association, many of them (50 percent of primary care docs and 30 percent of gastroenterologists) were still not testing for H. pylori in patients with first-time ulcer symptoms. Rather, they were simply treating these patients with acid-suppressors. Ulcer symptoms, however, do not ulcers make. Such symptoms are frequently vague and nonspecific to ulcers per se and are similar to the far-more-common symptom complex known as “dyspepsia.” Since the NIH consensus panel had specifically recommended not treating H. pylori in patients with dyspepsia but no ulcer, even when H. pylori was known to be present, it could be argued that these physicians were merely practicing cost-effective medicine: treating first-timers with a safe and inexpensive agent known to both heal ulcers and relieve symptoms promptly in the vast majority of cases while reserving the more invasive and expensive tasks of diagnosing both ulcer and H. pylori only for patients whose symptoms recurred after treatment was complete. While this does not refute my thesis, it may explain Dr. Gerritsen’s memory of the report.

A bit of digging reveals that Marshall himself has had a hand in nurturing, if not creating, the myth. I tried to contact him to comment for this article, but he has not replied. Most of what I can glean from his Web page makes me think that he and I agree on important issues. For example, he lists Quackwatch, the most useful “CAM” information site on the Web, as one of his favored links (Barry Marshall 2004). (Disclosure: I have several pieces on Quackwatch and collaborate with its creator, Dr. Stephen Barrett, as co-host of the subsidiary NaturoWatch.) Marshall also links to a great debunking of “stress,” which I hadn’t previously seen (Spencer 2002). And he has, quite evidently, a good sense of humor.

Nevertheless, there seems to be a bit of the self-promoter about him. I say this good-naturedly and with an affectionate nudge, imagining that someday we may meet and chuckle together. But also linked to his Web site is a 1997 article in The Sydney Morning Herald that sets the stage of his humble Western Australian beginnings on a dirt floor in a mining town and then bursts with suggestions of eventual Galileo-like ostracism by the vested interests of the drug industry and the “conservative world of medicine”: “Everyone knew that bacteria couldn’t survive in the stomach’s acid environment. They’d been taught so at medical school” (Sweet 1997).

Huh? Everyone who has taken a microbiology course in the past few decades is aware that there are bacteria adapted to conditions far harsher than inside the stomach, including some that live at near-boiling temperatures and others that use ether—usually a powerful disinfectant—as a food source. Everyone who has studied histology and physiology knows that changes in the body’s microenvironment, including acidity, can be dramatic over very small distances (measured in microns). The means by which H. pylori withstands the stomach’s acid environment have been largely elucidated. The organism has a membrane that is particularly impermeable to acid. The membrane also contains acid-dependent urea channels that begin to admit urea from the stomach juices when the pH is a mere 6 (10,000 times less acidic than the normal stomach pH of 2). The urea is then rapidly transformed to ammonia via the enzyme urease, which the bacterium produces in abundance. Because ammonia is a base, this produces a tiny region of non-acidic space within which the bacterium dwells (Sachs et al. 2003).

Although these mechanisms were not known at the time that H. pylori was discovered, the plausibility of such mechanisms existing was never an issue. To argue otherwise is to conjure a “straw man.” After all, similar organisms had already been described in the equally acidic stomachs of other mammals. The only questions that investigators in 1983 asked were: Are the bacteria really there, and if so, what do they do?

Marshall, who was interviewed for the Morning Herald article, offers no clarification when the reporter writes, “Marshall took at least a decade longer than he expected to persuade colleagues that ulcer patients with H. pylori should be treated with antibiotics” (Sweet 1997). That may be, but it wasn’t because of ostracism. Marshall had previously written, in a technical monograph, “In my naïveté I expected H. pylori to be immediately accepted as the cause of duodenal ulcer,” [but] “the presence of H. pylori in many apparently healthy persons has made its pathogenic role harder to understand and has delayed wide acceptance of the new bacterium as an important pathogen” (Marshall 1991).

Another link from Marshall’s Web site is to a radio interview in which he and others discuss the history of H. pylori, particularly with regard to its several near-discoveries prior to Warren’s finding in 1979 (four years before the letters in the Lancet). In that interview is this telling exchange among three people: Sharon Carleton (the moderator), Irvin Modlin (a gastroenterologist from Yale), and Marshall.

Sharon Carleton: One component you don’t mention is finance, money. How much influence do you think the drug companies have had in the past in trying to keep the truth at bay, or was it really primarily the medical establishment itself?

Irvin Modlin: I think those two components are almost inseparable; there’s little doubt in my mind that in a world where ulcers had been declared to be acid-related, corporations that were involved in the manufacture of acid-suppressive agents didn’t want to even conceive that there would be any other possibility for the pathogenesis of peptic ulceration. And of course, many of the people who were in a position to evaluate any other possibilities were heavily indebted to corporate support for their own research work and were, I think, not necessarily overtly but in a sort of covert or subtle way influenced to almost look the other way.

Sharon Carleton: In his own chapter in the book, Barry Marshall asks rhetorically, was there a conspiracy to keep the H. pylori story under wraps? His answer—yes. But this was fired more by inertia and bad advice than by the drug companies’ malice.

Barry Marshall: Well, you have to take pity on them because one particular company who’s now in the H. pylori business with everybody else was Glaxo, and after the helicobacter meeting that we had in Chicago one year, their stock dropped from $20 down to $18 which represented about a billion dollars off the value of their company (ABC Science 2003).

What’s missing from this pharmaceutical conspiracy theory is evidence that drug companies were successful in suppressing H. pylori research, even if this was their intent. The effectiveness of the “covert or subtle” means suggested by Dr. Modlin is simply not supported by the historical record, a fact that Dr. Marshall appears to have acknowledged. But it seems that even as Marshall equivocates when his champions trumpet conspiracy theories, he coyly encourages them. And yet, to paraphrase Galileo, medical science does move. It is my hope that Marshall the Quackwatch fan will read this article and recognize that his nurturing of the myth has given unintended succor to quackery.

Thus, the basis for the challenge remains untainted. The legend of H. pylori and peptic ulcer disease was a good try, because it is so widely believed, but it fails to stand up to scrutiny. In this case, as in modern medicine in general, progress resulted from the vigorous investigation of a plausible hypothesis—even if there was early skepticism and even if certain “vested interests” may have preferred otherwise. That said, I respectfully urge any remaining doubters to conduct their own research prior to submitting further nominees for exceptions to this rule.

Epilogue

An interesting article appeared in New Scientist a couple of years ago. It turns out that H. pylori lives in “around half the world’s population” and “in parts of the developing world as many as 90 percent of the population carries the bug,” but “only a fraction of these people ever get sick” (Hamilton 2001). Thus it may be a commensal after all. Of more concern is that it may protect against esophageal cancer, a disease that is recently on the rise even as rates of H. pylori carriage are falling. The question of whether it is wise to eradicate H. pylori thus remains open. Such is the nature of science: to march on. To Marshall’s credit, I found the article linked from his own H. pylori laboratory Web site (Helicobacter pylori Research Laboratory 2004).

Acknowledgement

I am indebted to Ed Leadbetter, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Connecticut. As a student in his microbiology course at Amherst College in 1973, I learned to expect the marvelous adaptive mechanisms to be found among the prokaryotes.

References

• ABC Science (Web site). 2003. The Helicobacter story. The Science Show. Broadcast 2/15/03. Transcript accessed 1/04 at: www.vianet.net.au
• Atwood, K.C. 2003. The ongoing problem with the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Skeptical Inquirer 27:23—29. (September/October). Available at: www.csicop.org. Accessed December 2003.
• ———. 2004. Letter to the editor (response), “The politics (and bad science) of alternative medicine: Reaction.” Skeptical Inquirer 28:60—61 (January/February).
• Centers for Disease Control (Web site). 1997. Knowledge about causes of peptic ulcer disease—United States, March—April 1997. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 46(42);985—987 (October 24). Accessed 1/04 at: www.cdc.gov
• Evans, D.J., Jr, D.G. Evans, D.Y. Graham, and P.D. Klein. 1989. A sensitive and specific serologic test for detection of Campylobacter pylori infection. Gastroenterology. 96(4):1004—8. (April).
• Gough, K.R., K.D. Bardhan, J.P. Crowe, et al. 1984. Ranitidine and cimetidine in prevention of duodenal ulcer relapse. A double-blind, randomized, multicentre, comparative trial. Lancet 2(8404):659—62 (September 22).
• Graham, D.Y., P.D. Klein, D.J. Evans, Jr, et al. 1987. Campylobacter pylori detected noninvasively by the 13C-urea breath test. Lancet. 1(8543):1174—7 (May 23).
• Graham, D.Y., G.M. Lew, P.D. Klein, et al. 1992. Effect of treatment of Helicobacter pylori infection on the long-term recurrence of gastric or duodenal ulcer. A randomized, controlled study. Annals of Internal Medicine. 116;9:705—708 (May 1).
• Hamilton, G. 2001. Dead man walking. New Scientist 2303:30—33 (August). Accessed 1/04 at: www.vianet.net.au.
• H. Pylori Research Lab (Web site). 2004. Accessed 1/04 at: http://hpylori.com.au/.
• Hornick, R.B. 1987. Peptic ulcer disease: A bacterial infection? (editorial). New England Journal of Medicine 18;316(25):1598—1600 (June).
• Jones, Myra. 2004. Letter to the editor, “The politics (and bad science) of alternative medicine: Reaction.” Skeptical Inquirer 28:60 (January/February).
• Kaptchuk, T.J. 2003. Effect of interpretive bias on research evidence. British Medical Journal 326:1453—1455.
• Koch, R. 1882. Die Aetiologie der tuberkulose. Berliner Klinischen Wochenschrift, no. 15: 221—230 (April 10). Translation from T. Brock (ed.). 1961. Milestones in Microbiology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 109—115.
• Marshall, B. 2004. Homepage. Accessed 1/04 at: www.vianet.net.au.
• Marshall, B.J., and J.R. Warren. 1984. Unidentified curved bacilli in the stomach of patients with gastritis and peptic ulceration. Lancet 1(8390):1311—5 (June 16).
• Marshall, B.J., J.A. Armstrong, D.B. McGechie, and R.J. Glancy. 1985. Attempt to fulfill Koch’s postulates for pyloric Campylobacter. Medical Journal of Australia. April 15; 142(8): 436—439.
• Marshall, B.J., C.S. Goodwin, J.R.Warren, et al. 1988. Prospective double-blind trial of duodenal ulcer relapse after eradication of Campylobacter pylori. Lancet 2(8626—8627):1437—42 (December 24—31).
• Marshall, B.J. 1991. In B.J. Marshall, R. W. McCallum, and R. L. Guerrant (eds.). Helicobacter pylori in peptic ulceration and gastritis. Boston: Blackwell Scientific Publications. xi.
• Marshall, B.J. 1995. Helicobacter pylori in peptic ulcer: Have Koch’s postulates been fulfilled? Annals of Medicine 27(5): 564—568. (October).
• McFarland, R.J., J.R. Bateson, R.B. Green, et al. 1990. Omeprazole provides quicker symptom relief and duodenal ulcer healing than ranitidine. Gastroenterology 98:278—283 (February).
• National Institutes of Health Consensus Conference. 1994. Helicobacter pylori in peptic ulcer disease. Journal of the American Medical Association 272;1:65—69 (July 6).
• Sachs G., D.L. Weeks, K. Melchers, D.R. Scott. 2003. The gastric biology of Helicobacter pylori. Annual Reviews of Physiology 65:349—69.
• Spencer, B. 2002. The unbearable bunkness of stress. Caffeine and Migraine (Web site). Accessed 1/04 at: www.batnet.com.
• Straus, E. 1996. Duodenal ulcer. In J.W. Hurst (ed.), Medicine for the Practicing Physician. Stamford, Connecticut: Appleton and Lange. 1583—1585.
• Sweet, M. 1997. Smug as a bug. The Sydney Morning Herald. August 2.
• Tytgat, G.N., and E.A. Rauws. 1987. Significance of Campylobacter pylori. Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapy. 1 Supplement 1:527S—539S.
• Warren, J.R., and B. Marshall. 1983. Unidentified curved bacilli on gastric epithelium in active chronic gastritis. Lancet 1(8336) (June 4):1273—1275.

Old Palafox Street is an aging, two-lane stretch of road running through the middle of Pensacola, Florida. To the east of Old Palafox, the next major road is Interstate 110 and in between those thoroughfares rests the sprawling campus of Pensacola Christian Academy, quickly followed by the even more sprawling campus of Pensacola Christian College. Both campuses are crammed with spotlessly maintained buildings and grounds. They stand out starkly amid the visible economic decline that surrounds them. The area is littered with empty, boarded-up buildings and abandoned strip malls.

Less than a mile north of the Academy on Old Palafox is a Christian educational center aimed at an even younger set of pupils. Bracketed by auto-repair businesses and across the street from a pawn shop, Dinosaur Adventure Land beckons all comers with a billboard-sized street sign that includes a fierce cartoon dinosaur and announces, “Evolution: What a Dumb Idea!” The park’s slogan is: “Where dinosaurs and the Bible meet!” Built in 2001 by Kent Hovind, founder of ministry, Creation Science Evangelism, the park boasts having hosted over 38,000 guests (Goodnough 2004). (This number may seem small compared to attendance rates at other Florida theme parks like Walt Disney World and Universal Studios, but it is also small in actual numbers. This averages out to approximately two hundred and forty guests a week, or less than fifty a day.)

The building of this rather small park has created a “tempest in a teapot” kind of controversy with local government. Essentially, Hovind converted the backyard of his home at 29 Cummings Road into a theme park, improvising an entrance off Palafox and refusing to file the proper zoning-permit requests with Escambia County. Hovind was charged on September 13, 2002, for failure to observe county zoning regulations, but through many legal maneuvers (multiple requests to have judges recuse themselves, switching lawyers and eventually requesting a public defender, and various stays requested, once for failing to appear), the case is approaching its two-year anniversary in the court system with no conclusion imminent. The charge is a second-degree misdemeanor resulting from refusing to pay a $50 permitting fee.

This is not Hovind’s only scrape with the law (a visit to the Escambia County Clerk of the Courts Web site shows over a dozen court cases involving Hovind and his family). A month before the misdemeanor charge, Hovind was charged with felony assault, battery, and burglary with assault or battery. Charges were dropped in December 2002 when the victim, a member of Hovind’s congregation, withdrew the complaint. (A lengthy description of the incident and an e-mail tit-for-tat between Hovind and his accuser can be found at www.geocities.com/kenthovind.) More significantly, the Internal Revenue Service raided Hovind’s home and office in April 2004, confiscating financial documents related to the ministry and the park since January 1997. The IRS is charging that Hovind is evading taxes on more than $1 million in annual income and does not have a business license nor tax-exempt status for his ministry and the park (Norman 2004).

Dinosaur Adventure Land (DAL) and Hovind’s home and ministry compound reside on approximately two acres. The entrance to DAL is off a road dominated by industrial parks, car dealerships, closed businesses, and convenience stores. The rear entrance, which leads to Hovind’s home and the buildings for his Creation Science Evangelism (CSE) ministry, are off a pleasant and quiet residential road lined with modest single-family homes. One could walk from the entrance of the park (with a gate that very much recalls the memorable entrance in the film Jurassic Park) to the entrance of Hovind’s ministry in about thirty seconds. The effect really is like being in someone’s big backyard, stuffed full of children’s games and playground equipment . . . and lots of fiberglass dinosaurs. (A pamphlet in the bookstore explains that the park is available for children’s birthday parties.)

It is notable that the “Suggested Donation $7.00” mentioned on the ground-level entrance sign becomes a required admission fee by the time one enters the attraction. The park is centralized around the three-story main building that houses the admission office/bookstore, “Hands-on Science Center,” and park offices.

The bookstore is small but has a wide-ranging selection of books, videos, DVDs, fossil replicas, hats, T-shirts, toys, cold drinks, photographic film, and so forth. The book selection reveals a broad array of concerns for Hovind aside from creationism. Unsurprisingly, there are titles addressing how to fight the teaching of evolution in public schools, but there are also some that describe how to fight the coming New World Order. Beyond conspiracies, Hovind also seeks to inform visitors about cryptozoology (books about sea and lake monsters—more about that later), home schooling, the risks of immunization, and a government-suppressed cure for cancer (Laetril).

Touring Pseudoscience

Practically from the moment you enter the park, you are surrounded by tour guides. They are all male, appear to be in their twenties, and all wear the same yellow, oxford, button-down shirts with the DAL logo embossed above the breast pocket. They are omnipresent and suffocatingly attentive. They are the most important part of the park, because they are the ones who carry out its true mission. They keep up a breathless stream of patter and proselytizing, declaring almost everything in the environs an example of God’s love and power.

The guides sweep the crowd of children and their adult escorts to the first part of the tour, called “The Expedition.” It is a collection of playground equipment and learning-center activities dressed up with dinosaur-related names and the occasional dino head or tail. There is a sign next to each activity that explains what to do, the science it purports to illustrate, and the spiritual lesson that one should really take away from the experience. There is a simple lever-and-pulley device that a child can sit in and pull himself up and down on very easily. It is called the “Longneck Liftasaurus,” and after the guides demonstrate the device with a child volunteer, they tell their audience that while the block-and-tackle device can give one a physical lift—that’s the science lesson—it is only God that can give one a spiritual lift—that’s the spiritual lesson.

Then it is on to the “Circle Swivel Springasaurus,” in which a child volunteer is spun around a clearing on a swiveling harness that is suspended under the spreading branches of a huge, live oak tree. The child is instructed in how to hold his legs and arms to control his balance and change the shape of the arc. The science lesson includes some vague statements about centrifugal forces and conservation of energy, but the real point is that a life without God can leave you dizzy and confused and only God’s guidance can show you the way. This is recited while the child stumbles around and nearly falls, indeed dizzy and confused after his Springasaurus experience, eliciting laughter from the crowd. The guides get a bigger laugh when they advise him that if he feels like he’s going to “puke,” he “should puke in the bushes and not on any of the rides.” This, like almost everything said by the tour guides, is scripted. There is a television in the bookstore running a copy of the videotaped tour of the park hosted by Hovind, and his narration, even down to the “puke” joke, is repeated by the guides.

And on and on it goes. A visit to a common trampoline equipped with a low basketball hoop is next. The object is to bounce but stay in enough control to focus on getting the ball through the hoop. God, the guide intones, requires your total concentration; you need to focus on Him too. A climbing wall gets the same tiresome treatment. The guides get to rest their voices when they declare twenty minutes of free play for the kids.

Two single-user restrooms form a border to “The Expedition,” and they provide what may be the most humorous item in the park. Bolted to the wall in both the boys and girls rooms are chains with tracts by the cartoonist/evangelist Jack Chick hanging from them. The pages are laminated and set on rings for ease of reading while using the toilet.

Eventually, the guides gather up the visitors and direct them to the “Raptor Range” on the other side of the park. This section follows the same pattern as “The Expedition,” but with less control by the guides. The area is dominated by the “Dinosaur Frisbee Golf” course and the “Super Sound Satellite” (two concave disks that send echoes back and forth across the park that can only be heard by standing and speaking in a particular spot). The game with the longest line is the “Dinosaur Hunt,” which is two large, rubber slingshots mounted in a wooden frame. Participants are given three water balloons apiece to launch at a metal-sculpture T. rex and stegosaurus.

During the free-play session earlier, five of the guides went to that game and began filling a large bucket with water balloons in preparation for the next stage of the tour. I wandered past taking photographs and eavesdropped on their conversation for a few moments. One would expect that men of that age would be talking about girls, sports, or even politics, but they were animatedly discussing a particular bit of scripture and how Presbyterians were particularly misguided in their interpretation. There was much gentle tsk-tsking when a balloon got loose from a fill-valve and sprayed the khakis of two of the guides.

Second in popularity to the water-balloon attack is the “Flingasaurus,” a four-seat swing like one would find at a carnival. It is painted with black and yellow striping and spots on a green background. There is also a teeter-totter with a crossbeam that is cut and painted to resemble a row of large teeth. The science lessons are quite a bit thinner here than on “The Expedition,” but the spiritual lessons are always there.

The “Science” Center

The crowd is eventually pushed along to visit the “Science Center.” Happily, it is air-conditioned and parents are slow to leave when the next stage of the tour is announced. The center is probably the cleverest in its seduction of the park visitors. Spread over three stories are demonstrations of actual science (gyroscopes, the Bernoulli effect, magnets, etc.) resting side by side with displays of pseudoscience, parapsychology, religious cant, and quackery. Each display is written in the same authoritative voice, but the voice is deceptive. Factually accurate sentences are mixed in with sentences that are patently false, producing a farrago of argument that only the most careful of readers will be able to parse.

A perfect example of this stands directly to the right of the entrance door. A sandwich sign rests above a long trough filled with sand, and a water spigot rests above the sand. Visitors are encouraged to make their own miniature Grand Canyon the way it was really made: by the Noachian Flood. The signs mock any other ideas of the canyon’s formation.

Another installation purports to address Haeckel’s Law (biogenetic law, or “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”), but only muddies and confuses an already complex debate. The many reasonable criticisms of Haeckel’s research and theorizing are blown out of proportion until they are distorted. One would believe that Haeckel’s theory was still an important part of biological research. This sign is the most intemperate of only a few that actually become active in their criticism. Most exhibits are gentle and nonconfrontational in their tone, which is what would be expected of instruction aimed at children. One seeking fire and brimstone would have to look elsewhere.

The middle of the bottom floor of the center is a sandpit with toy shovels and pails so that younger children can dig up fossil replicas. The pit is surrounded on three sides by glass cases at waist height that include fossil replicas and signs with scurrilous information denigrating geology, chemistry, and evolution. Particularly notable are the two models in the case directly next to the entrance of the “Fossil Dig.” One dramatizes a scene from the Old English epic poem Beowulf (an inexpensive Dover Books edition of the poem is for sale in the bookstore.) The plaque explains that this is one of many examples of dinosaurs living contemporaneously with humans; apparently, Beowulf is a historical documentary and not just a legend. Next to that is a model of a sinking ship with survivors floating in the clear acrylic waves being caused by what appears to be an Ichthyosaurus. The plaque accompanying this model provides a quote from a survivor of a torpedoed English warship, which describes the sea monster he sighted during the chaos. This is only the first example of what will be a much more richly addressed topic in the “Creation Museum”: dinosaurs did not become extinct in an ice age but are the sea and lake monsters that are known as Nessie, Ogopogo, Champ, and so on.

A staircase to the second floor runs along the back of the “Fossil Dig.” The staircase is decorated with an installation that has more than three dozen different kinds of scissors attached to it and declares itself to be “The Phylogenetic Tree: Scissor Evolution?” The second floor is much smaller and contains a few computers and television/VCR combos to peruse the CD-ROM and video library offered there. Small posters illustrating various aspects of evolution and geology decorate the walls of the second floor. They are printed with what appears to be a red-ink stamp that declares each of these tenets of scientific research a “Lie.” In the midst of these posters, Haeckel is invoked again and a small flame of outrage jets up briefly. The text on one poster insists that embryos never grow gills and that abortions are killing human beings, not fish. There is also a detailed model of Noah’s Ark.

The third floor is considerably smaller than the two other floors and is a recreation room with a television, board games, and an air-hockey table. The table is scattered with pamphlets for the park, Bibles, and many copies of Chick cartoon tracts that rail against evolution.

The tour moves on to the “Creation Museum,” which directly adjoins the main building and has a fiberglass T. rex dramatically bursting through the wall above the museum’s entry door. The first room of the museum greets you with a large heirloom Bible opened to Genesis. The room also houses a collection of several small animals (a Madagascar hissing cockroach, a ruby tarantula, chinchillas, etc.) whose complexities are alleged to be sterling examples of deficiencies in evolution that serve to disprove Darwin’s science and demonstrate the superiority of creation science.

The next room is a small theatre where one can watch a videocassette that explains Hovind’s grand vision of biblical creation, a young earth, and so forth. Directly above the large-screen television is a sign that says: “Reality! Evolution is a religion.” The back of the theater consists of two large, glass display cases, one that addresses the many ways in which the Noachian Flood created the modern world and the other devoted to explaining that dragons are not mythology but instead accurate reports of dinosaurs living among humans.

The third and final room of the museum is a collection of fossils, including a plaster cast (under glass with muted lights, as if it was truly a fragile antiquity and not a painted plaster casting) that purports to be from a thirteen-foot-tall human giant that was unearthed in California in 1883. This, coupled with other anecdotes and photos of other modern-age giants (Robert Wadlow, et al.), leads to an assertion that biblical accounts of giants were indeed factual. The room also contains a collection of replica fossils both real and fraudulent (including replicas of the Ica Stones and Paluxy dinosaur/man tracks). The room resembles a cramped version of a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum.

Dinosaurs and Deception

Dinosaur Adventure Land is deceptive on many levels. It is obviously wrong about its claims of a scientific explanation of the origins of life on Earth based on the Book of Genesis. But it is also deceptive in its manner and methods. Much of the park contains little more than playground equipment, exhibits, and activities one would find at a real science education center for children. These rather commonplace activities are dressed up in a dinosaur drag that has no real point except to act as a come-on, a lure to children and families that might otherwise stray away. A plain creationist museum would serve to attract only the already converted, acting as an echo chamber so that they might have their ideas repeated back to them. To attach a bunch of silly dinosaur names to playground equipment and stick fiberglass dinosaur parts here and there is the beginning of an effective marketing ploy. The realization that there really isn’t anything much dinosaur about it comes only after you have paid your admission and been subjected to a lengthy bath of proselytizing.

The proselytizing is very carefully scripted. Such a script is necessary because the connections between the games and activities and biblical doctrine are virtually nonexistent. The lesson signs are usually too high for any but the tallest of children to read, and the kids probably wouldn’t read them anyway. The guides are always there, always polite and always present, repeating the message. The message needs to be emphasized in this way because the items in the science center and museum are so scattered and diffuse that they never really add up to an effective argument. Here you will find some confounding assertions about granite and polonium halos; there a sign calls Darwin a liar. Here’s a display telling you that sea monsters are real; there a beach ball floats on a shaft of air generated by a fan. Curatorially speaking, the place is a disaster.

Dinosaur Adventure Land is just a playground tricked out with dinosaur dressage to attract an audience that can then be enticed, seduced, and eventually duped into accepting superstitions, pseudoscience, and plain nonsense passed off with a patina of both scientific and religious authority.

Acknowledgement

I thank Susan McLaughlin and Toria Martinez for their invaluable assistance in the researching and writing of this article. I also thank Barry Karr for his help and support.

References

• Analysis of Kent Hovind. 2004. Available at www.kent-hovind.com/.
• Dinosaur Adventure Land. 2004. Available at www.dinosauradventureland.com.
• Goodnough, Abby. 2004. “Darwin-free Fun for Creationists.” The New York Times, May 1.
• Hovind, Kent. 2004. Available at www.drdino.com.
• Norman, Brett. 2004. “IRS Raids Business, Home of Creationist.” Pensacola News Journal, April 17.
• The Talk.Origins Archive. 2004. Available at talkorigins.org.