Synogenes.com

Stem cells are those cells which are undifferentiated and have the potential to develop into any other type of cell. They are currently obtainable from four sources. Embryonic stem cells can be obtained from surplus foetuses left over after in vitro fertilisation. These cells are otherwise destroyed.

Second, there are egg donations, consciously made by people willing to support the research. Third is somatic cell nuclear transfer. This is where genetic material is inserted into an egg cell without any fertilisation taking place and it raises the spectre of cloning. Lastly, we have aborted foetuses.

Some people are quite squeamish about the idea of human cells being used in laboratory study but medical science has always done this. Until now, mostly dead human tissue has been used but the techniques enabling live human tissue to be used, and in particular undifferentiated stem cells, means that for the first time we are dealing with tissue that in some circumstances could develop into a human.

There is a huge cultural and ethical significance afforded to life, especially human life and this research evokes strong reactions from excited enthusiasm right through to abhorrence. And it matters. On the one hand we have the potential to cure a wide range of debilitating illnesses, to extend our understanding of human medicine in a way never before possible. On the other, we are learning how to create life from primitive building blocks opening the possibility of human cloning, genetic manipulation, transgenics and the like.

Much of the debate is couched in the terms of rights. A right is a power or liberty to which one is entitled or a thing to which one has a just claim. It is extremely difficult to apply this concept to cells which can neither act nor demand the expression of a right. Arguably the notion of cells having rights is a nonsense. But not so if those cells are defined as a person.

In modern society, the person is a legal entity with rights enshrined in law. It is this identification of stem cells with persons (albeit potential persons) that creates much of the ethical confusion. Once we concede that a stem cell has the same legal status as a person, the question of rights must be addressed.

And if the technology exists to take two elements which cannot survive and combine them to generate a cell which can survive and develop, does that imply we have created a legal entity called a person? For example, with somatic cell nuclear transfer – neither part can survive yet the combination can. Whatever a person is, it has to come into existence at some point and yet if it cannot show sentience, it cannot express what is necessary for rights to be claimed.

And there’s another difficulty because if we attach rights only to those able or willing to claim them, what happens to those persons who are unable to communicate? Those in a persistent vegetative state are of course, granted rights which we all feel they are entitled to, though they would fail any criteria based on communication. In law, those rights are exercised by proxy, someone else has to take the decisions.

So for stem cells to be treated as persons, the assumed rights have to be represented by a proxy. This is what religious zealots gravitate towards in claims about the rights of the unborn – they demand the right to represent the potential rights that may be afforded a group of cells if at some stage, they might become people. But it is ethical nonsense. In the same way as the right to free speech means nothing to someone in a persistent vegetative state, there are no rights associated with stem cells or foetuses. Rights do not exist in the abstract but are embedded in social practice.

For religious people, keen to defend the notion of souls, they have to resist scientific progress in understanding the origins of life because for them this process has to remain mystical. Understand how life comes about, evolves, mutates, develops, and you take apart the notions of souls, miracles, and supernatural beings. For rational people, an understanding of ethics helps us get our social priorities right.

There's an excellent site discussing these issues at
this site.

We have to question whether or not the drug industry can and should be trusted with something as important as human health. Like any commercial business, the drug industry invests money to develop products which it sells at a profit. The bigger the market it can generate and sustain for a product, the higher the profits. If it can develop products which are needed by large numbers of people, there will be even higher profits.

Given the cost and length of time taken to develop new pharmaceuticals, it is not surprising that drug companies want and need to continue selling the same product for many years and therefore take pains to sustain and protect the market with licences and trade agreements. Having invested over a long period in competition with other companies, who have similarly invested in competing products, they want to sustain income from the product as long as possible.

But this gives rise to tendencies that are not in the interests of those whose health the drug industry appears initially to serve. Why, for example, would any drug company be interested in curing a medical condition if instead it was possible to turn it into a chronic but managed illness? Commercially, this is an ideal outcome generating a large number of consumers who, by virtue of the chronic nature of the illness, will continue to consume the drug over long periods of time, sometimes for life.

And given the competitive nature of the research into new products, much of it will have been done before in other companies but will not be accessible because of commercial secrecy. So a potentially large proportion of the costs of development are consumed in reproducing research that has already been done - and the consumer pays for this wasted work.

And where do new products come from? Are they in response to new illnesses? Or are they in response to a wider definition of those chronic conditions that people are encouraged to believe they suffer from? In the latter case, the generation of new conditions is an important source of increased market. If people can be persuaded that they suffer from allergies, skin conditions, headaches, cold symptoms, aches and pains, and so on, they can be encouraged to sign up to long-term self-treatment generating increased revenues for the drug companies. Hyperchondria is highly profitable.

In order to protect their future product range, drug companies are now patenting genes. This absurdity gives huge commercial power to the companies investigating the genetic nature of some chronic illnesses. The implication is that once identified, any treatment that relates to the genetic basis of the illness involves a royalty payment. In other words, if you can identify the genetic basis of a chronic illness, you not only profit from any drugs you make to manage the illness, but anyone else using the same genetic information pay a royalty as well. Massive profits with a penalty for anyone else who tries to cure the condition. Research about the human genotype should be public domain.

So what's the alternative? Who is going to fund the research into these drugs? There is a strong case on health grounds for no longer trusting the drug industry to make, via the market, the choices about which new drugs are developed. It is clear that the commercial pressure to stimulate the perception of chronic illness and to avoid cure is not in the public interest. So let's consider a more sensible prioritisation.

Suppose that the research into drugs is made public domain so that all results are available to all researchers. That removes the competitive advantage from individual companies but increases the speed of research and removes duplication. State sponsored research would mean that the rights to these drugs would reside with the state as would all licencing rights. Companies would bid for development contracts to either carry out research or develop the drugs and produce them, or both.

The drugs chosen for development would be based on the health needs of the population. There would be far less diversity in the treatment of trivial conditions and much more focus on curative treatments. Rather than having fifty different preparations all containing paracetamol for cold symptoms, it may be that we have ten and the resources are redirected to something more medically advantageous.

If a drug is needed worldwide to treat the consequence of a disaster, we avoid the disgraceful scene of drug companies refusing to allow the cheap development of drugs in the third world. There would be no question of commercial interests because governments would own the rights and could make them available. Public health would be more important than private profit. Of course there will be an argument that without private investment, there wouldn't be the funding to do the research. It would be an interesting calculation to work out the wasted R&D through duplication together with the production of unnecessary drugs, coupled with the cost to the NHS of treatment of chronic illnesses, and offset costs required to direct medical research towards more socially important areas.

Public health will always be second priority to drug corporations making profits out of chronic illness. Drug companies can't be trusted to work in the public interest.

We often hear the claim that science is just another religion, based on beliefs and faith just as much as any of the mainstream belief systems. Scientists of course believe that certain things are true about the world and, so the argument goes, there's not difference between that an someone asserting their belief in a god.

A similar argument, though subtly different, is that since science cannot prove all that scientists believe, they are in the same position as theists. Their practice is based on their faith in certain things being true.These arguments are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of scientific activity. Beliefs are held by all people of course, and scientists are no exception.

Scientists working in any field will have hunches, intuitions, feelings about the way things work, the causes and effects, the mechanisms behind what they observe. But whereas for theists, the belief and the faith is the end point, for scientists it is the stimulus for activity, the beginning of investigation.

In trying to make sense of observations, sometimes startling, enigmatic, simply confusing, scientists try to provide some consistent explanation and that means generating some kind of theory. The role of the theory is to connect the observations together in terms of what is already known, providing a model which is more explanatory and consistent than what came before. Sometimes, you can't produce a new model without challenging some of the accepted truths and when that happens, experiments are devised to test them. In this way, science progresses by falsifying theories, proving them to be inaccurate.

That doesn't mean that all scientific knowledge is destined to become obsolete - far from it. Our knowledge, tested against the real world, increases, with those inadequate theories being superceded by better, more consistent explanations. What is does mean though is that scientists hope and expect their work to be improved by the critical attention of others. Scientists advance their theories and experimental evidences for others to criticise precisely so that weaknesses and inconsistencies can be addressed.

So the status of belief in science is always contingent, it is always subject to change. Some theories are so powerfully explanatory and without parallel, and these are accepted. It is not inconceivable that they will one day be challenged, but with passing time, it becomes less likely. No-one for example expects the force of gravity to be doubted though there is intense investigation into the nature of it. New models produce new challenging questions, new evidence produces new theories, new fields of investigation and new experimental techniques open up new areas of knowledge. We accumulate knowledge and the scientific process is the quality control.

Contrast that with religion. In religion, belief is all, explanation counts for nothing. In order to believe in supernatural beings who control our destiny (the essence of any religious belief) we have to suspend our critical faculties, turn off our intelligence, and accept irrational statements as true.

This is far beyond the question of doubt. We can doubt the existence of a god and it is rational to await credible evidence before affirming its presence. In the same way as someone suggesting to you that there is a fairy at the bottom of the garden would elicit doubt, so too should any suggestion of supernatural beings. To do otherwise is to give in to gullibility, to fail to distinguish the credible from the incredible, to abandon your critical faculties.

Science then is the opposite end of the spectrum from faith. Belief plays a part in all
scientific work but it is a contingent belief, subject to evidential check and open to disproof. A claim that cannot be tested is not considered an appropriate subject matter for scientific investigation - indeed much scientific work is based on generating precisely testable hypotheses. Science is not a religion, has none of the characteristics of a religion, and none of the practices.

The Human Fertility and Embryology Act from 1990 is being overhauled and the current white paper proposes to ban the use of hybrid-embryos conforming to public concern.

Opponents are concerned about the ethical and moral issues involved though thre is already a move to collect the skeptical comments from some scientists. Already the camp opposed to the process are using the american technique of raising the certainty threshold before a scientific proposal can be researched. It's been well-tested in the US: someone challenges the proposer to acknowledge that there is some doubt about the outcome of the research and on that basis, argues that the proposal won't deliver and is therefore not worth doing. This approach has been used to prevent climate research, to oppose pesticide limitation, limit stem cell research, and as part of widespread opposition to environmental controls. Now the approach is being used in the UK to limit stem-cell research.

Any scientist worth the name will argue that there is always doubt - that's why we do experiments and study real-world data. In the case of the hybrid embryos, there's no guarantee that they will deliver everything we need in terms of stem cell research but that's not a reason for rejecting the proposed work.

The stronger case is made by those who have moral or ethical objections but these are quite vague. A common objection is that it is playing God, creating a "something", a potential new species which has not naturally arisen. This is tantamount to saying that if variation arises naturally then it's OK to exploit it, but not using techniques to induce those variations. This objection unravels when we look at animal husbandry, and especially so in the deliberate manipulation of plant species. Agriculture has been doing this kind of artificial manipulation of nature for centuries. The only difference is the timescales.

When we think of playing God, we are of course invoking the presumed capabilities of a mythical all-powerful being, the perjorative intent of the phrase being used to make us think that the process is inherently wrong, not because the outcomes may be harmful but the very act of manipulating nature is wrong in itself. This seemingly goes not apply to the use of electricity, or even fire, processes which directly and deliberately manipulate nature. It also divorces the consequence from the cause, which is actually the whole point of ethical argument. Is it wrong to produce antibiotics for example? For years we have been using bacteria to produce quantities of antibiotics:
Research is very well established in this area.

But to be fairer, the concern is often really about the "human" part of the process, the human DNA. Here the moral issue really comes down to the religious basis for the objections. It;s about interfering with human biology at a low level. Medical intervention is apparently acceptable but low level cellular intervention is a problem. But what exactly is human? Is it the DNA, which can be constructed from inert constituents and assembled - it hasn't been done yet but the technology is available? And what of the living host cell that would have such DNA introduced to it? If we judge it to be human, what then of the so-called soul? At what point does conception take place? Would such a hybrid be 1% host soul? Soulless? Incomplete soul? The raise absurdly doctrinal questions for religious people reminiscent of the Inquisition.

One argument though is based on statistics. The claim is that such embryos would be 99% human. But in fact we share 85% of our DNA with mice. Does that make us 85% mice or mice 85% human? And in fact at the level of genes, we share 99%.

So some of the confusion is around what constitutes a human. As the mysteries of life are unravelled, there will soon be nothing supernatural about creating living tissue and the ethical issues will properly concern our understanding of what constitutes a person. Collections of cells grown in a culture do not constitute a person and the ethical question is really about whether it is moral not to study such tissues.

As Dr Stephen Minger of King's College, London, put it:
At present we have no therapies to even alleviate the symptoms for conditions such as Alzheimer's, spinal muscular dystrophy and motor neuron disease, never mind make an impact on disease progression.

So the ethical dilemma is in practice about stopping research because of quasi-religious notions of what being human consists of. The consequence of preventing this research is the rather uncharitable condemnation of sufferers from incurable diseases to continued suffering.

The possibilities for medical research now becoming available are precisely brought about because we are understanding that the biochemistry and genetics of living organisms has an enormous amount in common. Human life is not special and that is the broadside to religious thinking for it undermines the notions of chosen peoples, creation myths, notions of souls, sins, redemption and some all-powerful being that supposedly created us.

Because science is demonstrating life to be prosaic, commonplace, generic, mundane, and above all intelligible, religious and mythical interests are coming to the fore. Building on popular prejudice, they seek to role back scientific research but it's the people who suffer incurable diseases who will pay the price.

We frequently hear complaints that by critically examining ideas and rejecting them, we are thereby attacking the individuals who hold those views. Church people often claim they have been insulted by what people say about their notions of supernatural beings, miracles, and the like. An attack on the irrationalism of Islam is interpreted as an attack on both the rights of muslims to worship, and an attack on the muslims themselves. It is neither.

The reaction is understandable because where positions of influence depend on the respectability of the ideas advanced, as they do in political circles, criticising widely accepted beliefs undermines the credibility of those posts. To put it more concretely, if we demonstrate that bishops are neither expert nor even consistent in matters of ethical judgement, it is hard to justify their presence in the House of Lords, as least as far as they claim any sort of right to be there. In the same way, an Imam who is shown to be prejudiced or denigrating the rights of others, will find their claim to be a leader undermined. So it is no surprise that those who hold positions of power based on an irrational set of beliefs, are somewhat resistant to rational debate, and are keen to conflate the ideas with the people holding them.

By defining themselves in terms of their faith, they assume that others should also define them that way too. If indeed that happens, then any question of their faith is interpreted as an insult. It’s a very convenient tactic to deflect criticism from the core religious ideas and claims.

But what happens if ideas are treated this way? What happens if ideas are insulated from critical assessment because those who sincerely hold them might feel insulted in the process? Anyone claiming sincerely held strong beliefs could use the defence against insult as an argument for being free to live by those beliefs. So what about racists? Should they be allowed to be free of insult just because they are racists? Of course not. Ideas are not people, they don’t have rights.

But why should we concede a right not to be insulted? Whether or not someone feels insulted by an argument against something they believe, that cannot be an argument against the expression of the criticism. If the state used such an argument, we’d have repression and censorship such as existed under fascism. No-one seriously wants that. There is no right to be free of insult.

Ideas should be criticised and attacked mercilessly to identify weak argument, fallacies, non-sequiturs, and so on. The people engaging in those debates deserve full respect, even those who are adamantly trying to resist change, doggedly defending what seem to many to be absurd ideas. We involve ourselves in those debates to increase understanding. It’s only when we pin ideas to our egos that we risk insult.

Daniel Dennett advanced the position that religion is a social phenomenon that deserves scientific investigation, in his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Well worth a read. For those who feel insulted by such scrutiny, they need to remember that these are only ideas.

Some people will believe anything but many people will believe some odd ideas when they run out of help. This is especially the case in chronic illness where a busy GP may be unable to diagnose the cause of a problem and will offer only palliative, some would say placebo, treatment.

Suppose for example, you suffer from neuromuscular pain which is notoriously difficult to diagnose. Without expensive neurological investigation there is little hope of identifying any cause and as it often disappears for periods of time, any investigation could prove fruitless. Little wonder then that GPs will often suggest pain killers and exercise. Where this doesn't work, people will naturally turn to the alternative.

Since they think they've tried science, they now try something else and it might be homeopathy, a chiropracter, or some healing therapy suggested by a friend. That friend, having already spent money on it, will more often be a keen advocate than a sceptical assessor and will offer persuasive support.

The argument goes something like this.

1 There are things we don't know, phenomena that we haven't yet come across, lots of things we don't understand. Undoubtedly true.

2 Some people claim that these therapies have helped with x,y,z conditions and so they might help me. It may be that they work and we just don't understand how. Again true, but this is not used to suggest we put the claims to the test by studying them - it's a suggestion that we should take the claims to be true...

3 I have nothing to lose because I am still suffering. Except money and time...

Once started on the mystical route, there is a strong psychological motive for justifying the (seldom trivial) amounts spent. Instead of single sessions, they are courses of treatment and where they involve some measure of massage, the effects of increased circulation and movement of stiff muscles and joints, can work for a short time depending on the physical ailments. So with a minimum of light physiotherapy, it is possible to temporarily alleviate some conditions giving the patient a sense of wellbeing but also to build in the repeat-custom, that essential element of all successful businesses.

Now of course, there's nothing wrong with someone helping alleviate muscle and joint pain with a bit of massage (providing of course they know enough to avoid causing strain and injury through ignorance). And leaving it at that point is very close to the lowest (unspecialised) level of mainstream medical therapy known as physiotherapy, a thoroughly rational medical practice.

On the other hand, when it's laced with mystical theories about energy lines, channels, chakra and so on, what is being promoted is a mis-understanding of what is going on, confusing evidence-based diagnosis of injury with a belief-based conjecture about possible causes. Medicine relates the treatment to the diagnosis precisely to increase the likelihood of effective treatment and that requires observation, study of symptoms, understanding of anatomy and physiology, and also an understanding of how the body reacts to the proposed treatment.

All of this is deftly avoided by the introduction of mysticism. Since energy pathways and channels can't be seen or even detected, no-one can question them. Instead of a treatment based on good grounds for expecting success, we have a completely open question - try it and see. This is little better, and arguably worse, than medieval magic. It's a con-merchant's charter because anyone can make unreasonable claims and sell them to any gullible person looking for an alternative to the market medicine on offer.

Unfortunately, busy GPs who can't or won't refer people to specialists to get a clear diagnosis that will inform effective treatment, are effectively fuelling the growth of medieval mysticism in alternative medicine. As Dawkins has said, there is no alternative medicine. If it works reliably, it is medicine. The problem is that what evidence there is shows it doesn't work and there is a psychological predisposition to doubt the need for testing it.

One recent therapy that seems to have taken off in Australia and is growing in the UK is a combination of very light massage and foot rubbing which might feel nice in itself but isn't likely to cure anything or be a treatment for anything - it's called the Bowen Technique after its very wealthy founder.

Here's the official explanation of the technique from those who profit from it: The official version, and here's a useful blog questioning just one or two of the outrageous claims made.

In this apparent scam, the body is seen to be able to heal itself but the therapist in some way gives the body the information to be able to do so, not that there's any diagnosis involved. But I won't spoil the fun...

It's unfortunate that there's no protection for the psychologically vulnerable from this sort of exploitation though the best antidote is a strengthening of the critical faculties. In the UK, we still have the absurdity of a homeopathic hospital paid for by the state - fraud on a state-sponsored scale - and while we have that level of magic-worship, there's little hope for the unfortunate patients who are led to believe that if there's no pill on the prescription pad, there's no evidence-based medical cure.

There has always been a sense of wonder at how, even with all of our accumulated knowledge about biochemistry and genetics there's some spark of life required to get artificially made biological constituents to behave as a living organism. Gradually we are getting closer to understanding exactly what is required for biological molecules to start behaving biologically.

About five years ago, the mystery of what triggers fertilisation was solved when Tony Lai of the University of Wales College of Medicine found an enzyme that kicked the whole process off. New Scientist reported it at the same time as indicating that his research was coming to a halt for lack of funds.

It's been known for a long time that stem cells can be jolted into cell division by an electric shock so this mundane mechanism can kick of the cell replication process. The interesting question though is that starting from the biological building blocks, phospholipids, proteins, etc, what is needed to assemble them into a state identical to a living cell, and then what, if anything is missing.

At this point the research comes head to head with religion. Because if it's possible to create an organism that respires, feeds, replicates, where's the mystery of life? What need is there for souls, spirits, and the like.

We are already at the stage of being able to grow entire organs from stem cells as replacements for people who have serious damage or illness. So far we have grown skin, bone, blood vessels, and even bladders.

Nerve tissue is likewise possible offering a future in which the paralysed may walk again without the need for any miracles.

Once we can control the start of the process from raw materials, tissue becomes repairable in a manner previously unimaginable. For some this is a nightmare scenario but for those whose bodies have parts which are diseased, undeveloped, degenerating, it offers a massively improved quality of life. A blind person could have a replacement eye grown from their own cells, deaf people could have their hearing restored.

Combined with gene therapy there could be cures for diseases like diabetes in which the pancreas could contain modified stem cells leading to the production of insulin.

There is already alarm and disquiet about these techniques with the frequent assertion that it is playing God but if that's true, so was surgery, so was treating diseases with antibiotics. The reality is that God is invested with powers that are beyond our own, the supernatural, the fabulous, the omniscient. But as science advances, such possibilities become realities and what was formerly attributed to a God, becomes mundane. That's a serious problem for the religious because science always undermines their claims and always will.

God is always positioned in the world of magic with a claim that his (it's always his) powers cannot be understood. The moment they are understood, they cease to be God's and become ours and that's the way it always goes.

The spark of life is almost within our grasp. Once producing living things is mundane, the whole business of souls, miracles, the sanctity and the value of life, becomes highly socially charged. It will require a very strong sense of socially-grounded ethics to cope with the questions that come from being able to design and grow new organisms. It's more than ever important to ground ethics in social practice and keep it away from the theists.

You can hardly watch the TV news without some story about something increasing the risk of heart attack or some other serious illness. Often it's associated with the mundane, eating something or other can double the risk of some illness or other.

It makes for good headlines using a combination of ignorance and scare tactics. More often than not there's no way of judging the actual risk being talked about but that's the really important bit.

Suppose the risk of getting illness A is 1 in 100, or 1%. If we now discover that eating too much salt increases that risk, we can truthfully use a headline like "Eating salt increases risk of A". Notice that we don't say in the headline what the level of risk is, nor what the increase is. It might, for example have increased the risk to 1.001%, that is increased the risk by an absolutely tiny amount so that one more person in 100,000 may get the illness. Or it might have quadrupled the risk so that instead of 1 in 100, it's now 4 in a hundred who might get it. The cases are very different, but the headline is the same. And that's the problem with a lot of medical reporting.

Most of the medical trials are reported in journals such as the Lancet or the British Medical Journal, generally reputable journals that don't sensationalise. The papers come with an abstract at the beginning giving the general summary of what the article reports. In almost all cases, the scientific reporting is cautious, making only evidenced claims, pointing to the need for further research, putting the comments in context and so on.

But by the time these are reported in the headlines, all that boring, but crucial context gets lost. So instead of saying "marginal increase in risk", it becomes "increased risk". And as we're all paranoid about chronic and debilitating illnesses, we sit up and take notice of medical statistics - except we're not given them to evaluate. We're given untestable general statements.

Tonight on the BBC News, there was a report that obesity increases the likelihood of death in childbirth and for five minutes, that was the focus of the message. Right at the end, they managed to talk to a doctor who indicated that death in childbirth in the UK is very rare. In fact, though they didn't say so, it's around 1 in 5800. On the news item, despite having a fat pregnant woman saying she was scared by the danger of being overweight, there was no evidence presented.

No doubt, being overweight increases the risk of complications during pregnancy but what we had tonight was propaganda not information. It serves only to undermine rational discussion of risk because it doesn't provide any indication of scale, or the relative risks - that would have reduced the story to something quite mundane.

To evaluate risk, you need to know the actual incidence rate and then compare it with other risks. Then you need to think about how you mitigate those risks on a day to day basis. Some risks, you choose to take, others you don't. Some can easily be avoided altogether like the risk of cancer from smoking, whereas others such as traffic accidents are not quite as under your own control.

Being careful is all about getting an understanding of the absolute and relative risks, and poor journalism that obscures these for the headline just makes it difficult for people to judge seriousness. When people lose the ability to distinguish levels of risk, all sorts of silly fads are encouraged, and more significantly, people make dangerous choices about their health. That can range from whacky diets avoiding salt, to depending on shaman-like magic from homeopaths, through to swinging from one risk-avoidance strategy to another.

Whenever we see some headline talking about increased risks, we need to know what the risk was, and what it becomes. Without that we don't have a news story, we have a scare story.

The North East England Stem Cell Institute in Newcastle and the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases in London, King's College, have been granted licences to research on hybrid embryos. Fantastic news!

Contrary to some of the more lurid press reports, these are not Frankenstein scientists but researchers using a cow cell to host DNA from a human so that the cell mechanism can be used to produce what's called a blastocyst, a collection of undifferentiated cells which have the potential to develop into all kinds of other tissue.

The law says these blastocysts will have to be destroyed after 14 days but in the meantime they provide a source of stem cells. These are really vital for research because they can be triggered to develop into different types of tissue. Understanding the triggers for that differentiation will help us develop the possibility of using human cells, for example skin cells, to produce, in turn, stem cells which can then be triggered to provide replacement cells for damaged or diseased tissue.

Why is this important? If we have to transplant organs there is a high risk of rejection because cells are typed - donors have to be compatible with the recipient and often there's a close match but one which has to be managed by suppressing the immune system. That's a hugely invasive and damaging process for the patient putting them at risk of serious infections. If the tissue actually came from the recipient themselves, it wouldn't be rejected, they wouldn't need immunosuppresants and wouldn't risk infections.

For example, if a diabetic lacked cells in their pancreas to produce insulin, they can already get cells transplanted from donors but the transplanted cells don't survive long. If they were produced as the result of extracting stem cells from the patient themselves, those cells would continue to live - the patient would get a cure.

For Parkinson's patients or those with nerve damage, there is the potential for a cure based on the development of replacement tissue from the patient themselves. Curing blindness, paralysis, deafness, chronic nerve damage, degenerative illnesses are all on the horizon.

The conditions for scientific work in this area are strictly controlled by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority who issue the licences:
http://www.hfea.gov.uk/en/1640.html

But once the mechanism of cell differentiation is understood and controllable, there is no longer any need for using the cow cell as a host for the division process - we can use the cells from the patient themselves.

So what of the ethical issues involved? Despite the tabloids frightening themselves, this has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with religious indignation. The Scottish bishops have been campaigning against what they see as a "monstrous act against human dignity":
http://www.indcatholicnews.com/scmoem325.html

Unfortunately, what they don't really take into account is that cell biology is simply a branch of science and the medical advances will improve human dignity far more than any amount of pontificating. If you read their statement you will notice that having defined the development of stem cells using a cow cell host as "monstrous", they then variously appeal to freedom, democracy, ethics, and simply describe the work as "wrong". They don't mention the indignity suffered by spinal injury patients living their lives in wheelchairs.

They consider the science wrong only because it conflicts with catholic dogma. But in the real world, moral and ethical arguments are situated in human society and it's just not enough to label something bad or wrong. It is unacceptable to restrict scientific advances because believers in a supernatural being think it wouldn't approve.

The advances in cell biology offer thousands a chance of a cure from otherwise incurable illnesses. What really offends the church is that as science advances, the mystery of life becomes less mysterious, more explicable and less miraculous. The advances in cell biology are helping to remove the mysticism surrounding life. Life only has a special status because it has not been understood and has been claimed to be miraculous - and because we are especially attached to out own of course. But the processes behind it are perfectly susceptible to scientific analysis and limiting scientific advance preserves the opportunities for the religious to keep peddling notions of souls. The church has a long history of opposing scientific advances - fortunately it can't win.

One day, we'll be able to create cells as easily as we can make plastic today. We won't make prosthetics out of steel and plastic - we'll grow them so the patient gets a new hip, a new retina, new nerves. Surgery will be less and less necessary.

Then, as now, religious institutions will still have nothing special to offer ethical discussions. They'll still be calling it monstrous, though I daresay one or two bishops will be availing themselves of modern medicine to get treatments for their now-curable illnesses.

There's always been a debate about how consciousness works because we all have an impression that we exist inside of our brain and this idea that the self is somehow separate from the organ inside the skull gives rise to notions like souls. For science, trying to explain how we get that impression has been difficult because we are observing the observer that happens to be us...

There's clearly a lot of self-referencing going on as we are conscious of our own thoughts and that makes it difficult to analyse what's happening.

But there has been a lot of progress in neuroscience over recent decades and one book particularly has explained a great deal about our understanding of consciousness, how it arises, and our perception of self. Douglas Hofstadter has written a book called I Am A Strange Loop which offers a materialist explanation of consciousness based on science but being Hofstadter, he also draws inspiration from mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and even photography. His argument goes as follows.

Human brains have developed under evolutionary pressure, the ability to manipulate abstract symbols. Instead of always referring to the simplest of objects, we are able to use more general (abstract) ideas such as village, food, tools, harvest, season, etc. This abstraction enables us to manipulate and control the natural world and gives us an evolutionary advantage.

We relate these abstract conceptions together in patterns of symbols, adding new concepts to the network to integrate the new knowledge obtained through our experiences. Now all this seems to be evidenced in all sentient animals although the level of symbolism is variable. Hofstadter wonders about the symbolic structures available to a mosquito - presumably not very sophisticated. However, for people, these symbolic structures represented in distributed form in the brain acquire a property which is quite remarkable - they become self-referential, they become aware of themselves.

Now for the difficult bit, for which Hofstadter uses the ideas of an Austrian mathematician by the name of Kurt Gödel. He was interested in the attempt by Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead, to represent all of the axioms of mathematics symbolically. Russell and Whitehead hoped to prove that if you could represent a mathematical theorem using a logically consistent symbolic notation, then it would be possible to prove whether or not the theorem was correct. If they could do that, then any properly formulated mathematical statements would be provable - and therefore all of mathematics would be shown to be logically consistent. Cheers all round, Nobel Prize, nice holiday, etc... Unfortunately, Gödel tipped it on it's head.

He found a way to represent self-referential statements inside any consistent symbolic notation which meant unprovable statements could be accurately made, so mathematics could never be totally provable. Cancel the bubbly!

What's that got to do with consciousness? Well, our system of linked symbols in the brain will stay reactive unless they can become self-referential and that's what's happened in the mammalian brain. Hofstadter argues that as the brain develops, it is able to maintain self-referential loops of symbolic structures which provides us with self-awareness. It's that self-reference that gives rise to our perception that we are inside our brains. It also gives us the idea that we are in control.

Our consciousness is simply a property of the human brain and a bi-product is the notion of self. But the really important part is that because it is self-referential, it is not a closed system - the symbolic structures can influence the way those structures themselves develop. It's the basis of a learning system, developing more sophisticated symbolic structures to improve the manipulation of other symbolic structures, ultimately improving our ability to manipulate the real world.

Philosophers have argued about the mind/brain problem for centuries - is there something called mind independent of the brain? Since we feel ourselves perceiving things, it's easy to accept the idea of this other presence, and that's why many people believe there is a soul. Hofstadter shows how unnecessary this idea really is. Our perception of ourselves is easily explained by the self-referential symbolic structures in our brain.

But as neuroscience increases our understanding of how these symbolic structures are manipulated in the brain, and as we generate computer systems with a similar capability, we may see our understanding of consciousness radically changed. The transition from inert, to barely conscious, to human-level consciousness, or beyond, may simply be a question of the control of self-referential symbolic loops.

That challenges the very persistent belief that humans are special in their form of sentience. Already we have computer systems that can reason symbolically and there's no reason that they can't become self-referential. If Hofstadter is right, artificial consciousness is just as likely as artificial intelligence and we've been using the latter for several decades.

Just by way of a bonus, the advent of artificial consciousness should send the right-wing religious neocons into an ethical tailspin as we get legal calls for the rights afforded to embryos to be extended to computer systems that have developed the ability to express feelings. Now that would be a debate worth watching...

The recent figures say it all:
- 37% of the 132 NHS health care trusts still have contracts with homeopathic services

- 200,000 people are treated annually on the NHS using homeopathic remedies

- 55,000 appointments with homeopaths are paid for by the NHS each year

There are some signs that the position is improving and that GPs are finally getting the message that medieval magic is not the way to go... Spending on these quack cures has dropped from £593,000 in 2005 to a still lamentable £321,000 last year.

But of course, it's big business... something like £40 billion per year is spent worldwide on alternative therapies. And that's despite more than twelve authoritative and exhaustive studies which have shown repeatedly that there is no evidence to support them.

The latest exposé is the recent book by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst: Trick or Treatment - Alternative Medicine On Trial. The former is a well-known science writer who has a doctorate in particle physics, and the latter is a man of unusual background. He is now a Professor of Complementary Medicine though he trained as a physician, picking up a PhD on the way, and he has specialised in the clinical investigation of alternative medicines. Not only does he understand the world of alternative medicines, but he has the scientific rigour to investigate them thoroughly... which has made him the scourge of the alternative therapy world.

He has conducted several dozen systematic trials and over a hundred clinical reviews. In the course of his studies he exposed the assumption that alternative therapies were free of potential harm, identifying among other things that around 13% of acupuncture patients suffered side effects, that chiropractic spinal manipulation carried a risk of rupturing the arteries in the neck leading to strokes, and perhaps most irritatingly, that the flagship remedy of homeopaths, Arnica, has no more than a placebo effect in dealing with post-operative pain, bruising and swelling.

His results were so thorough and conclusive that he has been rewarded with no fewer than thirteen scientific awards, and two visiting Professorships. He is someone to take seriously when considering complementary medicine.

He argues convincingly that £500 million of NHS funding ought to be spent other than in selling water to gullible patients.

It is interesting that so many people, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, still adopt an uncritical attitude to the peddling of medieval remedies. Some considerable time ago, Theodor Adorno looked at astrology to try to understand the psychology of people who have irrational beliefs(The Stars Down To Earth).

He came to the conclusion that it was largely about the need for an abstract authority figure and where the individual had something of a rebellious streak, rather than trusting their own thinking, they delegate it to another abstract authority, which is opposed to convention. In doing so, we convince ourselves that we are being different, not accepting the status quo, and that we are asserting our individuality. In practice we are taking the very easy route of abnegating our responsibility to think for ourselves. (Adorno went on to argue that this sort of thinking predisposes people to acquiesce in authoritarian politics... but that's another story.)

It certainly seems that there's more than a hint of this type of psychology in the pandering to alternative medicines. But surely, it's about time that those working in medical roles should have the confidence to acknowledge the gains made during the Enlightenment rather than leading their gullible patients back into the dark ages.

Edvard Ernst - resume

Simon Singh

Here's a little puzzle to see whether we really understand the significance of accuracy.

A patient goes to a doctor and after explaining the symptoms, the doctor thinks it might be illness X, for which, fortunately, there is a test. He explains that the test is 90% accurate, that is 90% of the test results are right but 10% of them are incorrect.

The patient agrees to undergo the test and a couple of weeks later the patient gets the bad news that the test was positive saying he has illness X. Now the question - should he believe the results? Is he really likely to have illness X?

Intuitively we all say of course he is likely to have the illness, because the tests are 90% accurate.

But, we are missing a vital piece of information. How many people in the population actually suffer from illness X? Since I'm making up the problem I happen to have that statistic to hand and it turns out that at any one time, there is an incidence of 2 in 1000 of the population suffering from illness X.

Now let's do some simple sums.

Let's assume there are 10,000 tests done. We know that given our statistics, twenty of them will have illness X.

Since the test is 90% accurate, 18 of them will be told correctly that they have illness X, and 2 of them will be told incorrectly that they don't.

Now let's think about the rest, the other 9980 people who in fact don't have the illness at all.

For 10% of them, the test will return incorrect results so 998 of them will be told incorrectly that they have illness X. The remaining 8978 will be correctly told that they don't have it.

Lets add up the results:
Told they have illness X: 1016
Told they don't have illness X: 8984

Number who actually have the illness: 20

Probability that someone told they have it really does: just under 2%.
Probability that someone told they don't have the illness really doesn't: a touch over 90%.

This might seem like a catch question but it's an illustration of why statistical information has to be examined very carefully. It's remarkably easy to jump to conclusions without enough information.

If it's any consolation, this test is regularly applied to journalists, scientists, academics, etc, and most of them get it wrong too.

Incidentally, that's why there has to be so much rigour and exactitude in conducting medical tests for illnesses, especially rare ones. Reliability has to be very very high to justify diagnostic conclusions. A test accuracy of 90% with an uncommon illness is almost useless! So although it sounds impressive, we are really comparing it with how we'd feel in a test we'd completed ourselves - if we scored 90% we'd feel quite pleased. Science and especially medicine has to have very much higher standards.

Although the news that the University of Central Lancashire has suspended its BSc course in Homeopathy, the fraudulent sale of water as a medical treatment, is very welcome, the reasons are pretty appalling.

There is no absolutely no doubt that homeopathy is a fraudulent practice - that's been established after more than fifteen years and hundreds of scientific studies and reviews. There is not one shred of evidence that it is in any way effective other than as a placebo - and you always get the placebo effect for free with any treatment. So it's a fraud and a university, an institution supposedly offering higher learning, is disgracing itself pretending to offer a science degree in it.

Unfortunately, the University of Central Lancashire is not acknowledging the real nature of homeopathy. It's suspending the course because they can't get enough bums on seats.

According to the Guardian, Kate Chatfield and Jean Duckworth blamed the suspension of the course on low application numbers. But they said "Fortunately our masters course is thriving and we have been asked to focus upon this area and homeopathy research for the time being." In other words, those deluded individuals who have committed their time and money to studying a fraudulent methodology by signing up to the course, can continue doing so and still end up with a Master of Science degree.

That not only seriously undermines the value of possessing a Masters degree for all those scientists who have done serious scientific work, but also deludes the possessors of the fraudulent ones into thinking they are actually practising science.

When we can't distinguish between the scientific qualifications of those who have consistently and rigorously adopted a controlled scientific approach from those who believe fairy stories about water having a memory, the whole basis of science degrees is undermined.

No surprise then that many scientists, including Professor Colquhoun of University College, London have been so scathing. It remains a disgrace that 400 years after the scientific enlightenment, we have university departments peddling medieval magic as if it were science.

It's good news that the Lancashire BSc in Fraudulent Therapy has been suspended but disgraceful that so-called scientists do not have the intellectual honesty to admit that the courses they are offering are bogus, non-scientific, and based on belief in magic. They are putting their very suspect university positions before honesty and integrity. Shame on them!

If a science degree is worth anything, it is because of it's basis on the open, tested, evidenced, reliable, and rational scientific method in which results are openly presented and challenged, theories are put to the test, hypotheses disproved, and evidence is critically assessed. Knowledge of how the world works, whether we're talking about geology or neurology, astronomy or dermatology, is hard won - it takes work, gathering observations, assessing evidence, being willing to throw out theories that can't be backed by repeatable evidence.

Scientists earn their reputation not just through their intellectual and practical skills in obtaining those theories and evidence, but through their integrity in being prepared to acknowledge when the evidence contradicts them. Those running the courses in homeopathy in the University of Central Lancashire give us every reason to doubt both their integrity and their honesty.

The Blue Brain project has been working since 2005 on using supercomputers to simulate the operation of parts of the brain, producing a computer model which behaves in the same way brain tissue behaves.

The Blue Brain Project.

Simulated Brain Cortical Stem.

The purpose of the research is to develop simulated models which can show the same response to their environment as human tissue and that offers enormous therapeutic and research potential. For example, if the simulated tissue reacts in the same way as human tissue, we can experiment with the simulation to see how, for example, it will react when treated with certain drugs. Or how it would respond over time if a section of it was removed.

It has already been shown that the simulation can learn and remember and the researchers are able to see memories being retrieved. So not only do these simulations have medical research potential, but they also illustrate a very controversial aspect of human brains - consciousness.

One theory of the brain argues that consciousness is what is called an "emergent property" of brain tissue. When the brain complexity reaches a certain point, it becomes able to monitor its own functions, to become self-aware. At that point, it is argued, the brain shows the properties we identify as "consciousness". This comes in varying degrees, from vague awareness of individuality, to sophisticated abilities to think on demand and to be aware of doing so. Manipulating concepts, recalling memories on demand, exhibiting emotions, all have their roots in consciousness.

If these simulated models can be shown to possess emergent properties, then the whole debate about mind-brain takes an interesting turn. Religious people particularly maintain that people have something ethereal called a "soul", some immaterial essence derived from some spark of life. The only evidence ever offered for such a notion has been the first-person reports of individual belief, which of course is never susceptible to rational investigation. You either believe the report, or you don't - you can't test whether or not it's true because it depends on the perception of the individual reporting it.

But if a machine simulation can demonstrate just those characteristics of consciousness, self-awareness, memory, emotion, etc, then we have a curious situation. A machine which can report exactly the same first-person sensations, feelings, as a human. What then happens to the notion of a soul? Does the machine simulation have a soul? Religious folk would be opposed to the notion, but they would find it difficult to distinguish between a machine claiming a soul and a human, other than by insisting a soul only belongs to a human.

But by defining a soul as something specific to humans, in a form which cannot be investigated, the term loses any meaning beyond an expression of faith.

It's early days yet and although the Blue Brain project has produced some impressive initial results, they haven't produced anything too challenging for religious irrationalists but that will change. Give a machine self-awareness and the ability to make moral judgements based on ethical principles, and we could see the arrival of a new kind of Turing Test, one based on distinguishing between a dogmatic clerical leader and a Mark 1 Moral Reasoning Engine. My guess is that they'd be almost indistinguishable at the outset but the machine would learn and quickly outstrip the clerics.

That wouldn't be a major milestone since dogmatic ethics is very limited, but the process of moral learning would be a clear indication that moral reasoning does not require belief in any deity. People can be good without a God.

The TED conference in Oxford this year was the scene of an announcement by Henry Markram, Director of the Blue Brain Project, that we could have an artificial human brain within ten years.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8164060.stm

Although the motivation is to model the activity of a human brain to provide a tool for researching illnesses, and also to be able to replace animal testing in many cases, such work also has important consequences for our understanding of human feelings of self and consciousness.

Already it is possible to show these brain simulations images which are then automatically converted into internal representations. It has long been argued (by Hofstadter, Dennett and others) that a self-referential neural network would exhibit signs of consciousness and we are inching closer towards understanding whether this can be demonstrated in practice.

This is an important scientific activity in its own right as such a development would provide scientific evidence for the first time that our notions of self-awareness, of consciousness, of some soul or human essence, is a bi-product of the activities of the brain itself. If it can be demonstrated that consciousness can be produced artificially, then we can no longer claim that human life has some deep spiritual significance.

For that reason, if for no other, the developments of the Blue Brain Project will be an extraordinary path of discovery over the next ten years.

They have already been able to simulate credibly the neuronal activity of a rat brain. Couple a greater mental capacity with an ability to communicate and respond and we have something able to participate in learning and self-evaluation.

One interesting ethical question will be what rights do we afford such a "brain"? Is it a person? It would meet the criterion of sentience. Similarly, if it was self-aware and was learning, would it be developing a personality? Would it acquire values? Who would be entitled to turn it off, if anyone?

Science fiction used to be so far removed from practical science as to permit the use of the term fiction. Now, science advances so fast that what counts as science fiction today, is a research project tomorrow, and scientific evidence in a year's time. We could be seeing the emergence of artificial consciousness, mirroring the development of artificial intelligence from the late 50s into the 90s. Although there are major difficulties with artificial intelligence, few now doubt that we can get machines to do remarkable feats of reasoning. When we first interface with a reasoning, self-aware artificial brain, will we be able to distinguish its consciousness from any other conscious entity?

It is not a surprise for most rational people that a report commissioned by the Food Standards Agency has found that organic food is no healthier than non-organic food.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8174482.stm

But although the report explains that there is no public health advantage to people eating organic food, there is no explanation of why this should be the case. But it's not difficult, nor secret. In fact it's rather obvious if you know a little bit about biology.

Plants take up nutrients through their roots and as long as the nutrients get through the roots, they will nourish the plant. But the really important point is that plants take up their nutrients as inorganic ions.. For example, Nitrogen is absorbed either as an ammonium ion, NH₄⁺, or as a nitrate ion, NO₃^-. Potassium is taken up as a positively charged inorganic ion, K⁺. Until the organic material providing those sources are decomposed into their inorganic state, they cannot be used by the plant.

That's basic biology. So as far as the plant is concerned, organic is just the same as inorganic. The plant will grow in exactly the same way regardless of whether the nitrogen comes from organic or inorganic sources and will only be taken up once they are available in inorganic form.

Therefore it is entirely obvious that there would be no additional health benefits to eating organic food. It's the same food!

One of the reasons why supermarkets can charge such high prices for organic foods is because most people don't understand very basic plant biology. Their customers' poor understanding of science helps them hoodwink gullible people and take higher profits. The customers think they're getting better food when in fact it's the same food at higher prices.

A little science goes a long way so it's worth making the effort to understand it. And the internet is an excellent place to find these things out.

You might still prefer to eat plants grown organically perhaps because you believe that it's better to avoid chemicals, but that too is a fallacy. Organic fertilizers also break down into inorganic chemicals - they wouldn't work otherwise. So you are not avoiding chemicals.

Avoiding pesticides is of course another matter but there's no guarantee that foods sold as organic are pesticide-free. All it means is that the pesticides used are likely themselves to be organic in origin, and therefore possibly contain unidentified chemicals as well. Indeed some organic pesticides such as rotenone are toxic to humans too. Rotenone produces Parkinson-like symptoms in rats. It's not nice stuff!

The message is clear. Don't get conned by the organic hype. Wise up and learn a bit of biology. It's not difficult, and it's not secret.

In America recently, there was a ruling by the Federal Trade Commission against a company called CVS Pharmacy Inc. They were cashing in on the recent scares about flu to market a product which they claimed could prevent colds, fight germs, and boost immune systems. Unfortunately, there was no evidence...

Last year, the FTC issued rulings against a number of other companies including Airborne Health Inc, Improvita Health Products Inc, and Rite Aid Corporation. These were promoting health food supplements that could apparently treat colds and the flu... Hmmmm.... Colds and flu are viruses... and these were being treated by... dietary supplements...

Read about it here.

This case is interesting because the FTC is responsible for consumer protection against false claims, and it files a report when it thinks there is a likelihood that the law has been broken. But the report is not itself evidence that the company has broken the law, even though in this case they're paying out $2.8 million in consumer refunds.

Normally consumer legislation is seriously hampered in the case of Woo merchants because the actual evidence is always very thin on the ground. Few detailed studies are done on whether these wacky therapies and products actually do anything. Partly that's because the resources to investigate them cost money and it is better spent elsewhere, but also because Woo practitioners are remarkably evasive when it comes to controlled, double-blind trials. They like stories and anecdotes, rather than clinical trials which tend to expose their empty claims. The sell the placebo effect but they don't want everyone to understand that or sales will fall.

In the case of Woo therapies, the libel law often protects practitioners against direct challenge. And in order to demonstrate fraud, you have to be able to show that someone is knowingly selling a fake treatment or product as if it was the real thing. If they are ignorant of the facts, but believe they are selling something real, that's a valid defence. Ignorance of human biology and science is an excellent defence for individual Woo practitioners.

But in the case of a corporation with the resources to find out and keep informed, it seems there is at least some expectation that they observe the requirements of evidence before making extraordinary claims. If only that was enforced in the case of people selling crystals, ear candles, aromatherapy, homeopathy, Reiki, and all the other baseless therapies and products out there.

Leaving the Land of Woo, by Bob Lloyd, is now in production and should be out by the middle of October.

Woo is that land where the constraints of the real world don't apply, where therapies and cures are effected through undetectable energies, where our biochemistry and physiology are irrelevant and are replaced by aligning chakras, and unblocking channels. It's the land where magnets and crystals can influence our bodies in ways unknown to modern science, defying all reason and rationality.

Leaving the Land of Woo looks at how we get our knowledge of the way the world works, how we test it, and how we can challenge theories to see if they are right. It looks at the varieties of Woo including theories about alternative medicine, food, religious beliefs, and claims about the paranormal. It takes a critical look at what these varieties of Woo have in common, and shows how the theories all rely on a believing viewpoint in which our rational faculties are suspended. Such a viewpoint would have catastrophic effects on our practical lives if allowed to extend into all areas, and yet we are led, credulously, to spend vast amounts of money on untested, baseless products.

Leaving the Land of Woo provides a checklist of useful questions to be asked of alternative medicine practitioners, and a guide to evaluating the claims made.

If you have ever even been tempted to spend real money on Woo products, whether alt-med, foody therapies, supplements, detox, or religion, you could save yourself money by buying this book. It would pay for itself just by avoiding one encounter with Woo.

Watch out for the release:
http://www.leavingthelandofwoo.com

The continuing saga of the misplaced libel suit against Simon Singh brought by the British Chiropractic Association grinds into its latest phase today, as Dr Singh applies again for permission to appeal. He's been denied twice, but once he has exhausted the UK courts, he can then take the case to the European Court. He's back in court today, but with little chance of success - judges very rarely challenge each other's judgements.

Already we have seen the British chiropractors reeling from the attention they have attracted to unfounded claims of what they can treat, including childhood colic and asthma. More than 500 of them have been reported to the regulatory authorities including the Advertising Standards Authority, the Trading Standards Authority, and even their own regulatory council, the General Chiropractic Council.

The McTimony Chiropractic Association issued a rather panicky letter to its members urging them to take down their websites and remove unevidenced claims, and whole business is feeling the effects of the Quacklash.

The evidence offered by the BCA to support the use of chiropractic in treating childhood colic and asthma was reviewed by the British Medical Journal who had an exceptionally low opinion of them. The BMJ editorial described the references as having been totally demolished. Which to any reasonable person indicates that there wasn't any evidence there.

We hope that Simon Singh is successful, not just for him personally, so he can get on with his excellent work unhindered by this ludicrous case, but because there are wider implications for the free criticism of medical therapies. If someone comes along with a preposterous theory and starts charging confused people for treatment that has no scientific basis, we'd all be justifiably talking about fraud, deception, dishonesty, unethical practice and so on. And the way to establish whether or not that really is the case, is to look at the evidence. That's all Dr Singh tried to do.

The reaction of the BCA in resorting to libel laws to try to shut him up, rather than offering high quality scientific and medical research speaks volumes about them, and their concern for commercial opportunity rather than scientific credibility. Let's hope the Quacklash they've unleashed on themselves spreads to all the other purveyors of Woo. At the very least, it might make them think twice before trying to stifle the voice of reason.

Latest news, just in...

Simon Singh has been granted leave to appeal, in a scathing judgement against Justice Eady.

Details here: Index on censorship.

Great news. Let's hope that the Quacklash continues and spreads against all those dodgy purveyors of Woo.

A recent Ipsos Mori poll commissioned by the British Council asked whether or not creationism should be taught alongside evolution in British schools. A staggering 54% agreed that "Evolutionary theories should be taught in science lessons in schools together with other possible perspectives, such as intelligent design and creationism."

Up till now the UK government has rejected the accounts of intelligent design and creationism as being unrecognised as scientific and therefore having no place in a science classroom.

The question though is why so many people can give credibility to such ideas? The notion of intelligent design argues that everything in the world is fulfilling some predetermined plan, that randomness is not a driving force in nature. This contradicts the evidenced mechanism of natural selection, the motor behind evolution.

When people have such little understanding of evolution, they can easily be led to consider it as simply a theory. But evolution is a fact, not a theory. Evolution is a fact with incontrovertible evidence.

The action of natural selection based on random mutations, in the development of species is now so well evidenced that it too is a fact. These are every bit as much facts as is gravity, the refraction of light, magnetism, or photosynthesis.

When evolution is demoted to the rank of just an idea, merely a theory, the door is opened to unevidenced ideas as if they are of the same rank, of the same validity.

We need to get across the idea that theories are derived from data, that they have to explain the data, and make testable predictions. Anyone can invent a story and creationism is just such a story. But there is a crucial difference between creationism and evolution and that of course is the evidence.

Considering creationism as a theory implies that it has some predictive power, that it adequately explains the data, when in fact it is nothing of the sort. It is nothing but a story. The questionnaire used the word perspective to describe creationism, rather than the word theory. One wonders what the results of the survey would have been if they had more accurately described it as a story.

Over the last few years there has been a growing availability of university courses and degrees in Complementary and Alternative Medicine, CAM, but recently there have been moves to examine the content of the courses.

Dr David Colquhoun has been using the Freedom of Information Act to request information about the course contents from a number of universities and has been met with a blank refusal. But David Colquhoun, being the way he is, insisted, appealed, won, and has obtained some frighteningly irrational content.

The quacklash has awakened some of the university administrations who, although they want to exploit the revenue stream coming from low grade private institutes, by validating degrees in CAM, are now seriously embarrassed by course content that includes crystals, magnets, healing energy, and the like.

All UK universities have now stopped issuing BSc degrees in homeopathy - doubtless on the grounds that it is difficult to award a science degree to a non-science, and to examine something with no real content. Some others have halted enrollment into the CAM courses in recognition that there is an academic standards problem. But some shameless institutions are trying to shy away from scientific scrutiny by rebranding the degrees as BAs. As if it is possible to hide lack of content by calling them arts courses.

But what happens to the students, those well-meaning folks who thought they would build themselves a career helping people, students who accepted that if they obtained a degree from a university they could expect to have received a university education. Instead they come out with a piece of paper stamped by a university that has woefully compromised its academic standards for commercial reasons. They will have been taught unregulated content with no scientific basis whatsoever, sat examinations which were marked outside of the university, based on course materials that the university may not even have seen. Their qualifications are a testament only to their deception.

Nevertheless, they will go out into the world, opening businesses and treating people as if their training meant something. They will call themselves healers and therapists, they'll display their certificates on the wall, and start taking money off people who know even less about human biology than they do. The deception of pseudoscience is given commercial respectability by the woeful negligence of the university administrators.

Many universities subcontract both the teaching and the examining, charging for the university stamp. The University of Wales for example validates 34 outside institutions and collects over £5 million per year.

It is to be hoped that the very many principled scientists and others who teach in universities, will wake up to what is going on and start to publish the irrational course content of these pseudoscience courses. Maybe that will embarrass the universities into keeping up their academic standards and will stop them deluding paying students into believing that they have had a university education in pseudoscience.

After more than a decade of stalled stem cell research, the US regulators have now approved thirteen new lines of embryonic stem cells. The restrictions put in place by George W. Bush in capitulation to religious prejudice, have now been lifted and the production of the thirteen new lines is invaluable in opening up research. The new lines were developed by the Chidren's Hospital, Boston, and Rockerfeller University in New York. There are another ninety-six stem cell lines in the process of approval.

BBC Report

The importance of the stem cell lines is that they can be maintained indefinitely, to produce an unlimited source of stem cells for research. In turn, the stem cells can be made to develop into any type of tissue, providing reproducible lines of cell types for controlled scientific studies.

By being able to control the variation, relying on identical cell types, controlled trials can be carried out in medical research ranging from transplantation and regeneration, therapeutic delivery systems for delivering drugs to specific tissues and experiments to understand chromosomal abnormalities, to replacements for animal testing experiments, and many more.

The religious right in the US campaigned for the restriction of stem cell research on the grounds that the source of stem cells were days-old embryos, which they claimed were detroyed in the process. Of course, the days-old embryo was not a foetus, nor any form of sustainable human life. They claim a moral case based on the belief that an undifferentiated collection of human cells possesses an immaterial entity called a soul and that their belief that this is the case, should override the case for research.

All those sufferers from Alzheimers, those needing tissue transplants, those suffering genetic illnesses, blindness, diabetes, and a host of others, apparently have less of a case than the unidentifiable, unevidenced, undetectable, insubstantial, immaterial existence of something they call a soul. What a strange irrational morality!

But even though the decision to release the cell lines is very welcome, we should still recognise the religious straight-jacket under which the authorities are working. It remains illegal in the US to use government money to create or destroy an embryo. For this reason, the stem cell lines were created with private money from cells left over by fertility clinics, embryos that would otherwise have been thrown away.

Miami Herald report

It only takes a few stolen emails and an article or two referring to Climategate to cast aspersions on the reputation of scientists investigating climate change. Suddenly, because someone has made allegations that the scientists were trying to bias the results of the work, the presentation of the story is shaped in the form that the evidence for climate change itself is somehow questionable.

This subtle ad hominem attack on the science is reminiscent of the campaigns in the US against junk science, by which was meant not badly conducted science or results presented as science but unsupported by evidence. Instead what was meant was that you should automatically discount the evidence altogether, not even reading it. The oil companies, following the disgraceful record of the tobacco companies, branded any scientific results they wished to ignore as junk science thereby hoping that no-one would actually look at it. The just raised the accusation of bias and let popular prejudice take its course.

This is the very opposite of a scientific approach. Science relies on publishing the evidence, presenting the theories, challenging the hypotheses that come from those theories, and testing the claims. In science, everyone has a vested interest in finding out the truth of the claims. That is why data is published, is criticised, is reproduced. It is as important for the scientist to find out that they are wrong, as to find corroborating evidence.

Until now, it may have been common for scientific results to be criticised on the grounds of inadequate methodology, or too small a sample size, or insufficient detail, or poor predictive capabilities in a theory. It has even been occasionally the case that an individual scientist will be challenged as to their results - sometimes, they've even been exposed to have fiddled their data. But it's the very fact of peer review, of reproducing the evidence and challenging published work, that enables such self-correction to take place.

But now, because of some stolen emails quoted out of context, Saudi Arabia is claiming that the whole of climate science is biased. A moment's thought tells us that this cannot be the case. Whether or not you think that the behaviour of any individual scientists deserves criticism, it is still a fact that the polar ice caps are melting, that the atmosphere of the earth is warming up, that carbon dioxide levels are rising. The evidence is still there regardless of anyone's particular beliefs - science is independent of anyone's particular beliefs.

Part of the smear story concerns the use of the word "trick" in an email to describe a statistical technique to remove bias in a sample of data. When we have a table of figures that already contains measurements from more than one source, we need to be able to process those figures to separate them out. Removing the influence of one cause to display an underlying trend is a statistical technique that is often described as a trick, rather like we describe a quick way of adding fractions, or dividing by a hundred. It doesn't mean a fiddle, or a con, or some deception. It means a technique.

There never was any indication in the emails that anyone was biasing or fixing the figures but calling into question the behaviour of the scientist is a classic case of trying to undermine the credibility of the scientific evidence. It is rather like finding that Einstein has stolen a pencil and therefore claiming he is dishonest, so he must have fiddled his scientific data. It's a nonsense. The scientific data stands on its own merits.

But the smear campaign does give states like Saudi Arabia, whose prosperity depends on increased oil use, an oportunity to try to discredit the case for global warming. This isn't a case of Climategate but of Oilgate, trying to tar good science with the smear of doubt to push a narrow economic agenda.

Already there has been an outcry from reputable scientists. Hopefully this disgraceful tabloid smear campaign will be left dead in the water and will serve only to highlight the narrow self-interests of those who put the interests of capital over global climate.

How many times have you heard that alternative medicine is holistic, and that by implication conventional medicine isn't? The idea is that the holistic medicine treats the whole person, and not just the symptoms, with the implication that conventional medicine doesn't.

But that's a complete misunderstanding of the word, what it means, and what it implies. Conventional medicine treats the whole person, but from a position of medical knowledge. As Professor Michael Baum argues, compassion without knowledge borders on the fraudulent, so when alternative medical therapists make claims to practice holistic medicine, in the absence of medical knowledge, they are behaving fraudulently.

Medical knowledge is based on detailed study over a very long period of time, with incorrect theories replaced by better ones based on evidence, with research published and shared to inform better, improving practices. By understanding the whole person, that complex biological organism, medical science integrates holistically, the hierarchy of organisation that makes a human being. When a medical practitioner treats a patient, they are using all of that accumulated knowledge, and providing fundamentally holistic care.

The trite and distorting use of the term holistic as a barely disguised accusation against conventional medicine, goes hand in hand with that other term of abuse, allopathic. Allopathic was a term coined by homeopaths to refer to anything that didn't fit their theory. It has no medical, scientific, or even colloquial meaning at all.

In April this year, Professor Michael Baum delivered a lecture at the Royal College of Physicians in which he looked at alternative and complementary medicine in the treatment of breast cancer. He looked at the complexity of the illness, the complexity of the issues surrounding patient care, the ethical decisions involved, the whole totality of the necessary care required for treatment.

It is one of the very best, real-world examples of the differences between those who claim to know about holistic medicine, and the actual practice of it. This talk is highly recommended to anyone interested in what the word holistic really means, and how it really relates to modern medical practice. It should be required viewing for any alternative practitioner who has ever used the word.

The Michael Baum Lecture

There have been articles in national broadsheets claiming that there's a massive conspiracy, that the data was fixed, that carbon dioxide is not the culprit, and that even if it is, it's not down to humans.

Despite the huge amount of climate research, the availability of public data, the detailed reports of the evidence, the consensus between diverse scientific bodies around the world, despite the correlation of the data from different satellites, different monitoring stations, different climate models, and even different sets of historical records, people still claim that it's a put up job. Why are the deniers so vocal? Why are they so convinced there's a conspiracy?

Big bad government?

Part of the answer lies in the idea that government is a bad thing, and therefore anything that requires governments to act to constrain the actions of its citizens is something to be resisted. In the US, there is widespread fear of growing government. It should be remembered that national government only came to the United States in order to constrain the growth in power of the federal governments. The aim was to prevent federal governments taking too much tax, and exercising too much power. National government was supposed to protect the rights of individuals to do just what they wanted.

So Americans see growing government with suspicion, as a reduction in their rights, curtailing their freedom. And talk of freedom gets a big crowd in the US. Whether it is the freedom to bear arms, or drive an SUV, many US citizens resent any limitations on them imposed by the state. The land of the free has an ingrained ideology against government control, whether it applies to industry or the individual.

This leaves it rather ill-equipped to deal with issues which require actions that the population as a whole will not like. Basing politics on populism means that such issues are never faced. If the electors don't want tax rises, you can't increase government spending. If they won't give up their SUVs, it's hard to promote lower fuel consumption. When it comes to climate change, American politicians typically run scared. Despite popular support for doing something, there is mass resistance against anything that will affect them personally.

This fear of government is behind some of the scare stories about global warming research. It is popular to make two related claims: that the data was fixed, and that there is a conspiracy to spread international government control. By linking the two, deniers of global warming can avert attention from the evidence at the same time as playing on anti-government prejudice. This stalls any moves to get people to wake up to the reality of climate change in the US.

Fixed data?

This claim is almost too ludicrous to take seriously but in the wake of the media frenzy over the leaked emails from the Hadley Climate Research Unit, it is important to make some points clear. Firstly, the data from Hadley corresponded perfectly to the climate data obtained by the two other separate independent sources, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climate Data Center (NOAA and NCDC) and the Goddard Institute of Space Studies. If Hadley's data had been fixed, it would have been necessary to fix the others in exactly the same way. Secondly, they would have had to keep it secret. So the World Meteorological Organisation would also have had to be in on the conspiracy. It is inconceivable that this could happen, especially in view of the fact that the message is not what governments want to hear.

Conspiracy?

There are several versions of the conspiracy theory going around ranging from a plot to boost the sale of energy-efficient lightbulbs, through to the one about communists from Eastern Europe infiltrating green organisations to create a communist world government by stealth. This latter is favoured by American deniers who want to play on the prejudice against government control of anything. Somewhere in amongst that is the Telegraph line that it is all to do with the growth of European Union bodies and the removal of British national sovereignty. Hijacking the issue for such a strange political agenda encourages people to ignore the science.

If you doubt the accuracy of the data, you will be reluctant to base conclusions on it. If you question the motives of the people presenting the data, you will be reluctant to trust their conclusions, regardless of the data. And that's the idea behind the conspiracy theorists. But the data is solid, and the motives of the scientists are beyond question.

Not only are they presenting an unpopular message, unpopular for all governments, but even the sponsoring bodies would prefer not to have to listen to the it. It is a globally unwelcome message. If there was any conspiracy, it would be to promote the message of the global warming deniers, not the evidenced position of the scientists. The conspiracy theories just don't make sense.

The Evidence?

Here are some excellent and concise sources of information compiled by William R. Wilson, well worth reading. They give you the detailed facts which should help convince even the most adamant denier and many detailed links to further sources:
Evidence I
Evidence II Snow Cover
Evidence III The Arctic Ice Cap
Evidence IV Antarctic Ice
Evidence V Disappearing Glaciers

Whenever there is a natural disaster, the media always turns to some religious representative to wallow in the suffering, to explain that God is with us, that there is some underlying fundamental reason for suffering, and that people shouldn't see the tragedy as any reason to doubt their faith.

And the media always accepts that position with only the mildest of criticisms. Even the formidable John Humphrys of Radio 4's Today programme today gave the Bishop of York, John Sentamu, an easy ride as he sat quiet during the bishop's hopelessly incoherent diatribe. The worthy bishop was wrestling with a question that Humphrys put to him: how can a merciful god be responsible for such devastating disasters? For a bishop you'd think the question would be easy.

Of course it's a fair question and one which cannot be answered by the religious. The worthy bishop wriggled all over the place talking about the goodness of Christ, and the munificence of nature, and the power and beauty of the world, and all that stuff. But what he couldn't do was explain the actions of a supposed all-powerful deity causing disaster. You have to be a deluded theologian to wriggle out of that.

Haiti lies on the edge of the Carribbean tectonic plate and one of the fault lines which has been stable for the last three centuries or so, gave way to the pressure of plate movement. It was around 10km down in the ground that the quake occurred. That has nothing whatsoever to do with ideas about mythical super-beings, omniscient gods, or anything of the kind. This is a geological process which is well-understood but difficult to predict.

Whenever there is a disaster of some kind, it is natural that the media will focus on the human aspects of the story, the suffering, the relief effort, the economic and social consequences, and will try to convey the sense of human loss.

But to have a religious representative pontificating about the goodness of his mystical deity and coming over all pious about his sympathy towards the suffering people of Haiti, is not just irrelevant, but somewhat insulting. Attempting to gain publicity for religion at a time of such enormous suffering is opportunist and cynical at best.

And far from being a reason for deepening faith in religion, such disasters ought to help people realise that there is a material world, subject to physical laws and it operates quite independently from any mystical super-beings.

Such disasters show very clearly how utterly irrelevant religion is to the real practical interests of living people. If the religious bodies want an all-powerful god in charge of everything that happens in the universe, let's see them step up to the plate and claim responsibility on his behalf, instead of wriggling incoherently to evade it.

Some recent enquiries into the ITEC Reiki Diploma has turned up some interesting details. ITEC were asked about the unevidenced nature of this diploma course in which students were expected to take as fact notions such as chakras, healing energy, and auras, and to develop skills in "basic energy sensing".

ITEC it seems worked jointly with the Reiki Council to develop the course but didn't have much to do with the actual content. The course had to comply with the requirements of OFQUAL, but they too, it seems didn't have much to do with the content. As long as the course assessment seemed to meet the requirements, they didn't concern themselves too much with what was being assessed. So the trail went on to QCDA, the new incarnation of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

But they too didn't seem to have anything much to do with it, and so the trail lead to the Skills For Health organisation, another government body. It produced last year a document which reported on the provision of courses in the so-called alternative medicine professions. The document is remarkable in that it accepts unquestioningly spurious claims made by various groups of practitioners.

For example, it accepts the idea that craniosacral therapy has some basis in reality when it doesn't. It accepts the claims also of Reiki practitioners. It simply quotes them and then looks around to see if youngsters can get access to courses to give them qualifications.

By generating courses based on spurious content, unevidenced theories gain the currency of academic qualifications. The alt-med organisations simply need to generate the appropriate paperwork and show some evidence of assessing something, and they'll be able to jump through the appropriate hoops. No need to bother with evidence or demonstrating that the skills are actually real.

Candidates are supposed to be assessed on "basic energy sensing skills", which given that the energy is undetectable and unevidenced, is quite simply impossible. The course cannot meet the requirements of OFQUAL itself. So much for checking the standards.

But so far, no-one has yet explicitly said who actually checks the content of the syllabus but we can be reasonably sure it is not anyone who has had more than a fleeting acquaintance with scientific principles, nor any understanding of the need for evidence before making healing claims.

If that is really the case, then these qualifications are an embarrassing exposure of how corrupted the qualifications standards have become. If someone can get an ITEC Diploma based on invented energy sources and non-existent skills, then it won't be long before we see groups of devout fundamentalist Christians setting up their own Diploma in Faith Healing. Or how about an NVQ in Dowsing.

As if it is not enough of a mockery of those youngsters who work really hard for their A-levels and GCSEs, we should also remember that youngsters encouraged onto these courses are basing their future employment on at best delusional ideas, and at worst fraudulent practices. That's no way to treat our young people. Time to ask some hard questions!

Some recent enquiries into the ITEC Reiki Diploma have turned up some interesting details. ITEC were asked about the unevidenced nature of this diploma course in which students were expected to take as fact notions such as chakras, healing energy, and auras, and to develop skills in "basic energy sensing".

ITEC it seems worked jointly with the Reiki Council to develop the course but didn't have much to do with the actual content. The course had to comply with the requirements of OFQUAL, but they too, it seems didn't have much to do with the content. As long as the course assessment seemed to meet the requirements, they didn't concern themselves too much with what was being assessed. So the trail went on to QCDA, the new incarnation of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

But they too didn't seem to have anything much to do with it, and so the trail lead to the Skills For Health organisation, another government body. It produced last year a document which reported on the provision of courses in the so-called alternative medicine professions. The document is remarkable in that it accepts unquestioningly spurious claims made by various groups of practitioners.

For example, it accepts the idea that craniosacral therapy has some basis in reality when it doesn't. It accepts the claims also of Reiki practitioners. It simply quotes them and then looks around to see if youngsters can get access to courses to give them qualifications.

By generating courses based on spurious content, unevidenced theories gain the currency of academic qualifications. The alt-med organisations simply need to generate the appropriate paperwork and show some evidence of assessing something, and they'll be able to jump through the appropriate hoops. No need to bother with evidence or demonstrating that the skills are actually real.

Candidates are supposed to be assessed on "basic energy sensing skills", which given that the energy is undetectable and unevidenced, is quite simply impossible. The course cannot meet the requirements of OFQUAL itself. So much for checking the standards.

But so far, no-one has yet explicitly said who actually checks the content of the syllabus but we can be reasonably sure it is not anyone who has had more than a fleeting acquaintance with scientific principles, nor any understanding of the need for evidence before making healing claims.

If that is really the case, then these qualifications are an embarrassing exposure of how corrupted the qualifications standards have become. If someone can get an ITEC Diploma based on invented energy sources and non-existent skills, then it won't be long before we see groups of devout fundamentalist Christians setting up their own Diploma in Faith Healing. Or how about an NVQ in Dowsing?

As if it is not enough of a mockery of those youngsters who work really hard for their A-levels and GCSEs, we should also remember that youngsters encouraged onto these courses are basing their future employment on at best delusional ideas, and at worst fraudulent practices. That's no way to treat our young people. Time to ask some hard questions!

The eBook version of Leaving the Land of Woo is now available in PDF format downloadable from here priced at $6, or €3.40-ish, or just under £4. Payment is through PayPal.

The ruling has just come in that Simon Singh, accused of libel by the British Chiropractic Association, has won the right to appeal. The case depends on the claim that the BCA was supporting the treatment of various childhood ailments including colic by chiropractic techniques.

There is a dearth of evidence supporting these claims and Dr Singh, along with Professor Edzard Ernst wrote a book called Trick or Treatment, in which they explained this at great length. As the claimed evidence provided by the chiropractors was criticised for not having controls, for having small sample size, for depending on anecdotal accounts, and so on, it was clear to every reasonable person that the BCA did not have a case.

This ruling now means that Simon Singh can actually fight the libel case using the fact that his article in the Guardian was "comment". This subtle point is crucial for anyone writing about science in which the assessment of evidence is critical. It means for example that someone can claim of another scientist that there is no evidence to support their claims - without the accuser being dragged into the courts.

Most rational people would wonder why, faced with the challenge from Simon Singh, the BCA didn't simply offer to present the evidence to an independent panel and get it assessed. Or at least sue the Guardian newspaper instead of Simon Singh personally. If the intention was to suppress criticism, as was implied in the ruling issued today, then that constitutes a libel warming against those who criticise unevidenced alternative therapies.

The ruling today is very welcome because it means that those of use who are critical of Woo therapies which lack supporting evidence, can offer opinion which challenges the claims, without the threat of libel action.

Of course, Simon Singh is only half way through this ordeal which has already cost him £200,000. He still has to win the libel case, but now he has a very strong and credible defence. When he gets his day in court, he can easily justify his opinion by reference to the evidence and that's what it should have been about all along.

There must be many BCA members wondering why their collective reputations have been dragged down by the involvement in such a ludicrous libel case in the first place.

The news of Simon Singh's win in the appeals court over his right to publish criticism of chiropractors is very encouraging but there is still an important battle to get the libel laws reformed in the UK. Until the law is changed, scientists and journalists arguing for evidence in the face of irrational health claims can be accused in the libel courts.

You can do something really practical to help, simply by signing a petition. Simon Singh is asking for as many people as possible to support the campaign by signing the petition.

It will take you a minute and cost you nothing. If you can persuade someone else to do the same that will help even more. The more people supporting the campaign, the more likely it is that the major parties will put something in their election manifesto. That's no guarantee that they'll implement it of course - political parties are notoriously dismissive of the electorate at all times except during elections - but at least they will be pushed to consider it.

Please publicise this and try to get others to sign too. Every little will help.

It is excellent news that after the hammering the BCA received in the courts on 1st April, they have now decided to drop the libel case against Simon Singh. Although he remains out of pocket by around £100k+ he has won the case convincingly. Not only did the chiropractors have no evidence to back their claims, but the courts have also heavily criticised them for bringing the libel charge in the first place.

It is absurd that when chiropractors claim to be able to treat childhood colic, that they should be able to use libel laws to suppress the challenge that they have no evidence. Any reasonable person would expect them instead to offer their evidence and debate the case, not try to gag critics.

Chiropractors make a lot of money from treating people and many of them have made claims which they cannot justify. The BCA itself had to warn its members not to do so. Patients who are handing over money for treatment which does not have evidence of efficacy have a reasonable claim that they are being deceived and they may now be encouraged to challenge the chiropractors.

Despite a mealy-mouthed press release pretending that their case was justified, the BCA has been publicly humiliated and exposed as an organisation trying to use libel law to suppress very reasonable criticism of its unjustified claims.

Hopefully there will now be a backlash from the very many chiropractors who treat back pain and don't make outlandish claims. They are justified in demanding to know why their representatives chose to waste their subscription money defending people who shouldn't have been making those absurd claims in the first place. They have seen their trade association bringing them all into disrepute.

It may also have the perhaps unintended consequence of getting chiropractors themselves to start to appreciate the need to back up their claims with high quality peer-reviewed scientific evidence, the sort provided by controlled, randomised, double-blind trials, not the sort published in tame journals owned by chiropractic and alternative medicine companies.

Onwards with the quacklash!

Given the ardently pro-science views of David Willetts, and the announcement of very tight spending controls on science over the coming period, it is reasonable to ask if he will also be supporting demands for the closure of the London Homeopathic Hospital, that stain on the rational reputation of the health service in the UK.

The last refit cost the country £20 million and the country subsidised this completely irrational nonsense. During a time of financial pressure, surely one of the most obvious cuts that would both improve budgets and the medical care of those who are deluded into attending it, the ending of funding for the London Homeopathic Hospital would be a positive step.

It's early days but Willetts has a respect for science, so he can be expected to be sympathetic to the rational case against irrational alternative medicine. But he is keen to help meet the demands of the government for £6 billion cuts and that means that he will expect science to lose a share of its funding. Just whether he will exert any influence he has on those in the Department of Health remains to be seen. But this is an excellent opportunity, with justifiable spending reduction arguments, to rationalise away the nonsensical use of homeopathy in the National Health Service.

Eight people were sentenced to two years each in jail and fines of £1500 in the Indian courts this week. You'd think it was a relatively minor offence but in fact it was the judgement in the Bhopal case, the world's worst ever industrial accident. They were convicted of negligence and the consequence of that negligence was a death toll of at least 15,000 and perhaps as many as 25,000 people.

On 3rd December 1984, the Union Carbide plant was manufacturing pesticides and around forty tons of methyl isocyanate escaped and fell on the town killing over 3000 people in the first day. There followed decades of health problems including birth defects. For such a disaster you would have thought that if the company was found to be negligent, the CEO would be in the dock. After all, the decisions about how the plant was run, what it's profitability targets were, what style of management to impose, its operating procedures, would have been taken not solely by the eight Indians convicted and sentenced this week, but also by the Union Carbide chairman, Warren Anderson.

He's been named as one of the accused, but not mentioned in the sentencing. Why is that? Well, back in 2000, Warren Anderson was reported to have gone into hiding to avoid being served a summons to appear in a Manhattan court to face civil proceedings against him.

The Indian government had brought a civil case against him in 1989 and they agreed a settlement of $470 million. Nevertheless, the Indian Supreme Court issued an arrest warrant on the charge of "culpable homicide" but Anderson refused to be subject to the Bhopal Court jurisdiction.

So whilst the big bosses behind the company get off without facing court, eight Indians including the Indian chairman, managing director, vice-president, works manager, a plant superintendant and a production assistant are jailed and fined.

The current owners of Union Carbide, Dow Chemicals, are still resisting attempts to get the corporation to take full responsibility for the disaster. Union Carbide argued that the Indian branch should take full responsibility even though UC owner 51% of the Indian subsidiary. Such is the way with corporate responsibility - it doesn't count for very much at all.

UC has effectively offered up eight Indian employees as sacrificial lambs whilst one of the biggest culprits in the case has managed to avoid extradition, arrest, and a court appearance. It is understood that Warren Anderson is a very wealthy mean. Cynics might think these two facts are related.

"The Society's foundation is its Fellowship, which is made up of the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from the UK and the Commonwealth. Each year, the Fellows elect 44 new Fellows and eight new Foreign Members, chosen for their scientific achievements." That's what the Royal Society website says.

And it goes on, "The main criterion for election as a Fellow is scientific excellence." So there you have it. A scientific body which elects its fellows on the basis of significant scientific achievement. The Royal Society says "The election process for Fellows and Foreign Members is extremely rigorous and is based upon the established practice of peer review."

But it seems there has been some exceptions made. The Princess Royal and the Duke of Kent are already Fellows. Already the Duke of Edinburgh is a Fellow, and now his grandson Prince William is to be made a Fellow as well. What, we might ask, is their scientific achievement? Why on earth would an eminent scientific society pander to royalty by degrading the significance of a Fellowship of the Royal Society and allowing in people who, apart from being very rich, have no distinguishing characteristics at all.

The election of honorary fellows was supposed to be to be able to include those who "rendered signal service to the cause of science, or whose election would significantly benefit the Society by their great experience in other walks of life". But in this case, it's a throwback to the time in the seventeenth century when scientists were thin on the ground and in order to get any financial backing for scientific activity, you had to pander to the rich and famous.

The clause to elect honorary fellows enabled wealthy folk to parade around with FRS after their name. The category of Royal Fellows allowed direct pandering to royalty which persists to this day. Of course, it won't make any real difference to anything much. Prince William has not shown any "significant scientific achievement", indeed he's not personally involved in anything much to do with science. He's just a name.

But this is just another aspect of marketing, branding, and pumping up the Society's importance through the names it can list, rather than through the profoundly important scientific advances of its true Fellows. Does it really need to do this pandering? True, it is part of the long historical tradition of the Society and by pandering to the self-importance of royalty, it make funding a little more likely, so there's clearly an opportunist element to this act.

But doesn't it look cheap? The spirit of rationalism that pervades the real work of the Royal Society ought at the same time to point to the need to drop the archaic pandering to royalty and other wealthy people.

You might have missed the hoards of media pundits falling over themselves in indecent haste to correct the appalling hackfest unleashed on the climate scientists earlier this year. Phil Jones, the climatologist in East Anglia, was accused of impropriety and dishonesty in his handling of climate data and the Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann was accused of falsifying and suppressing data.

But the whole business was investigated and they were cleared, completely and unconditionally cleared. There was no conspiracy, no fiddling the data, no suppression of the facts, and the statements made by the scientists were supported by peer-reviewed research.

Recently the Times retracted its version of events but did you hear the media celebration that the UK climate scientists were completely exonerated? Of course not. The problem with such apologies after the fact is of course that the damage is already done. The volume of the accusations far exceeds the whisper of apology and by the time it is made, everyone has got used to the idea that climate data was fixed.

The sad fact is that once people have been told something, especially by someone trusted, then regardless of how much later contrary evidence is produced including retractions, a substantial number of people will continue to believe what they have been told. Propagandists have long known this and exploit it regularly. In this case climate science has been the victim.

You can read the Times statement here.

Many people will be staggered at the news that a so-called College of Medicine is to set up following the ignominious demise of the Prince of Wales' Foundation for Integrated Health in May this year amidst fraud and money-laundering charges.

Four of the ex-directors or fellows of the disgraced Trust are directors of the new college although none of them have been charged with the previous fraud. George Gray, the charity's finance director has been charged with theft of £253,000.

The registration documents of the new college are available on David Colquhoun's website.

One of the aims of the new organisation (I can't bring myself to call it a college) is "7.4 establish an evidence base for integrated health and for individual complementary modalities;" which basically means looking for evidence in support of alternative medicine theories.

In science, we start from the data, from observation and measurement, from real phenomena and only once we have evidence of the existence of the phenomena, do we start to theorise about them, to look for explanations for them.

But these guys prefer to do it back-to-front. Start with the assumption that it works, then go trawling for something that they can pass off as evidence. That's a scandalous way to treat medicine and medical science and it has nothing to do with an honest assessment of the efficacy of the treatment.

One of those modalities they talk about is homeopathy, discredited over and over by detailed scientific evaluation for more than a century. There is not a shred of evidence that it has any efficacy at all and there are countless evidenced reasons why it cannot work. Not only is it a stupid theory, but the practitioners themselves have consistently failed to provide any evidence of efficacy. How then can it be considered any kind of treatment, any sort of medical modality.

Evidence based on anecdote is not evidence. A college of medicine that has nothing to do with medicine and isn't a college but a commercial promoter of Woo, is not a college of medicine.