Science Fact vs. Science Fiction: Can You Tell the Difference?
A portrait of skepticism while reading information online.
Today's growing distrust of science is not an academic problem. It can be a matter of life and death.
Take, for example, the tragic incident in 2016 when at least 10 U.S. children died and over 400 were sickened after they tried homeopathic teething medicine laced with a poisonous herb called "deadly nightshade." Carried by CVS, Walgreens, and other major American pharmacies, the pills contained this poison based on the alternative medicine principle of homeopathy, the treatment of medical conditions by tiny doses of natural substances that produce symptoms of disease.
Such "alternative medicines" take advantage of the lack of government regulation and people's increasing hostility toward science.
These children did not have to die. Numerous research studies show that homeopathy does not work. Despite this research, homeopathy is a quickly-growing multi-billion dollar business.
Such "alternative medicines" take advantage of the lack of government regulation and people's increasing hostility toward science. Polling shows that the number of people who believe that science has "made life more difficult" increased by 50 percent from 2009 to 2015. According to a 2017 survey, only 35 percent of respondents have "a lot" of trust in scientists; the number of people who do "not at all" trust scientists increased by over 50 percent from a similar poll conducted in December 2013.
Children dying from deadly nightshade is only one consequence of this crisis of trust. For another example, consider the false claim that vaccines cause autism. This belief has spread widely across the US, and led to a host of problems. For instance, measles was practically eliminated in the US by 2000. However, in recent years outbreaks of measles have been on the rise, driven by parents failing to vaccinate their children in a number of communities.
The Internet Is for… Misinformation
The rise of the Internet, and more recently social media, is key to explaining the declining public confidence in science.
Before the Internet, the information accessible to the general public about any given topic usually came from experts. For instance, researchers on autism were invited to talk on mainstream media, they wrote encyclopedia articles, and they authored books distributed by large publishers.
The Internet has enabled anyone to be a publisher of content, connecting people around the world with any and all sources of information. On the one hand, this freedom is empowering and liberating, with Wikipedia a great example of a highly-curated and accurate source on the vast majority of subjects. On the other, anyone can publish a blog piece making false claims about links between vaccines and autism or the effectiveness of homeopathic medicine. If they are skilled at search engine optimization, or have money to invest in advertising, they can get their message spread widely. Russia has done so extensively to influence elections outside of its borders, whether in the E.U. or the U.S.
Unfortunately, research shows that people lack the skills for differentiating misinformation from true information. This lack of skills has clear real-world effects: U.S. adults believed 75 percent of fake news stories about the 2016 US Presidential election. The more often someone sees a piece of misinformation, the more likely they are to believe it.
To make matters worse, we all suffer from a series of thinking errors such as the confirmation bias, our tendency to look for and interpret information in ways that conform to our intuitions.
Blogs with falsehoods are bad enough, but the rise of social media has made the situation even worse. Most people re-share news stories without reading the actual article, judging the quality of the story by the headline and image alone. No wonder research has indicated that misinformation spreads as much as 10 times faster and further on social media than true information. After all, creators of fake news are free to devise the most appealing headline and image, while credible sources of information have to stick to factual headlines and images.
To make matters worse, we all suffer from a series of thinking errors such as the confirmation bias, our tendency to look for and interpret information in ways that conform to our intuitions and preferences, as opposed to the facts. Our inherent thinking errors combined with the Internet's turbine power has exploded the prevalence of misinformation.
So it's no wonder we see troubling gaps between what scientists and the public believe about issues like climate change, evolution, genetically modified organisms, and vaccination.
What Can We Do?
Fortunately, there are proactive steps we can take to address the crisis of trust in science and academia. The Pro-Truth Pledge, founded by a group of behavioral science experts (including myself) and concerned citizens, calls on public figures, organizations, and private citizens to commit to 12 behaviors listed on the pledge website that research in behavioral science shows correlate with truthfulness.
Signers are held accountable through a crowdsourced reporting and evaluation mechanism while getting reputational rewards because of their commitment. The scientific consensus serves as a key measure of credibility, and the pledge encourages pledge-takers to recognize the opinions of experts - especially scientists - as more likely to be true when the facts are disputed.
The pledge "really does seem to change one's habits," encouraging signers to have attitudes "of honesty and moral sincerity."
Launched in December 2016, the pledge has surprising traction. Over 6200 private citizens took the pledge. So did more than 500 politicians, including members of US state legislatures Eric Nelson (PA), James White (TX), and Ogden Driskell (WY), and national politicians such as members of U.S. Congress Beto O'Rourke (TX), Matt Cartwright (PA), and Marcia Fudge (OH). Over 700 other public figures, such as globally-known public intellectuals Peter Singer, Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer, and Jonathan Haidt, took the pledge, as well as 70 organizations such as Media Bias/Fact Check, Fugitive Watch, Earth Organization for Sustainability, and One America Movement.
The pledge is effective in changing behaviors. A candidate for Congress, Michael Smith, took the Pro-Truth Pledge. He later posted on his Facebook wall a screenshot of a tweet by Donald Trump criticizing minority and disabled children. However, after being called out that the tweet was a fake, he went and searched Trump's feed. He could not find the original tweet, and while Trump may have deleted it, the candidate edited his own Facebook post to say, "Due to a Truth Pledge I have taken, I have to say I have not been able to verify this post." He indicated that he would be more careful with future postings.
U.S. Army veteran and pledge-taker John Kirbow described how the pledge "really does seem to change one's habits," helping push him both to correct his own mistakes with an "attitude of humility and skepticism, and of honesty and moral sincerity," and also to encourage "friends and peers to do so as well."
His experience is confirmed by research on the pledge. Two research studies at Ohio State University demonstrated the effectiveness of the pledge in changing the behavior of pledge-takers to be more truthful with a strong statistical significance.
Taking the pledge yourself, and encouraging people you know and your elected representatives to do the same, is an easy and effective way to fight misinformation and to promote a culture that values the truth.
Chicken that is grown entirely in a laboratory, without harming a single bird, could be sold in supermarkets in the coming months. But critics say the doubts about lab-grown meat have not been appropriately explored.
Last November, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration disclosed that chicken from a California firm called UPSIDE Foods did not raise safety concerns, it drily upended how humans have obtained animal protein for thousands of generations.
“The FDA is ready to work with additional firms developing cultured animal cell food and production processes to ensure their food is safe and lawful,” the agency said in a statement at the time.
Assuming UPSIDE obtains clearances from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, its chicken – grown entirely in a laboratory without harming a single bird – could be sold in supermarkets in the coming months.
“Ultimately, we want our products to be available everywhere meat is sold, including retail and food service channels,” a company spokesperson said. The upscale French restaurant Atelier Crenn in San Francisco will have UPSIDE chicken on its menu once it is approved, she added.
Known as lab-grown or cultured meat, a product such as UPSIDE’s is created using stem cells and other tissue obtained from a chicken, cow or other livestock. Those cells are then multiplied in a nutrient-dense environment, usually in conjunction with a “scaffold” of plant-based materials or gelatin to give them a familiar form, such as a chicken breast or a ribeye steak. A Dutch company called Mosa Meat claims it can produce 80,000 hamburgers derived from a cluster of tissue the size of a sesame seed.
Critics say the doubts about lab-grown meat and the possibility it could merge “Brave New World” with “The Jungle” and “Soylent Green” have not been appropriately explored.
That’s a far cry from when it took months of work to create the first lab-grown hamburger a decade ago. That minuscule patty – which did not contain any fat and was literally plucked from a Petri dish to go into a frying pan – cost about $325,000 to produce.
Just a decade later, an Israeli company called Future Meat said it can produce lab-grown meat for about $1.70 per pound. It plans to open a production facility in the U.S. sometime in 2023 and distribute its products under the brand name “Believer.”
Costs for production have sunk so low that researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh expect sometime in early 2024 to produce lab-grown Wagyu steak to showcase the viability of growing high-end cuts of beef cheaply. The Carnegie Mellon team is producing its Wagyu using a consumer 3-D printer bought secondhand on eBay and modified to print the highly marbled flesh using a method developed by the university. The device costs $200 – about the same as a pound of Wagyu in the U.S. The initiative’s modest five-figure budget was successfully crowdfunded last year.
“The big cost is going to be the cells (which are being extracted by a cow somewhere in Pennsylvania), but otherwise printing doesn’t add much to the process,” said Rosalyn Abbott, a Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of bioengineering who is co-leader on the project. “But it adds value, unlike doing this with ground meat.”
Lab-Grown Meat’s Promise
Proponents of lab-grown meat say it will cut down on traditional agriculture, which has been a leading contributor to deforestation, water shortages and contaminated waterways from animal waste, as well as climate change.
An Oxford University study from 2011 concludes lab-grown meat could have greenhouse emissions 96 percent lower compared to traditionally raised livestock. Moreover, proponents of lab-grown meat claim that the suffering of animals would decline dramatically, as they would no longer need to be warehoused and slaughtered. A recently opened 26-story high-rise in China dedicated to the raising and slaughtering of pigs illustrates the current plight of livestock in stark terms.
Scientists may even learn how to tweak lab-grown meat to make it more nutritious. Natural red meat is high in saturated fat and, if it’s eaten too often, can lead to chronic diseases. In lab versions, the saturated fat could be swapped for healthier, omega-3 fatty acids.
But critics say the doubts about lab-grown meat and the possibility it could merge “Brave New World” with “The Jungle” and “Soylent Green” have not been appropriately explored.
A Slippery Slope?
Some academics who have studied the moral and ethical issues surrounding lab-grown meat believe it will have a tough path ahead gaining acceptance by consumers. Should it actually succeed in gaining acceptance, many ethical questions must be answered.
“People might be interested” in lab-grown meat, perhaps as a curiosity, said Carlos Alvaro, an associate professor of philosophy at the New York City College of Technology, part of the City University of New York. But the allure of traditionally sourced meat has been baked – or perhaps grilled – into people’s minds for so long that they may not want to make the switch. Plant-based meat provides a recent example of the uphill battle involved in changing old food habits, with Beyond Meat’s stock prices dipping nearly 80 percent in 2022.
"There are many studies showing that people don’t really care about the environment (to that extent)," Alvaro said. "So I don’t know how you would convince people to do this because of the environment.”
“From my research, I understand that the taste (of lab-grown meat) is not quite there,” Alvaro said, noting that the amino acids, sugars and other nutrients required to grow cultivated meat do not mimic what livestock are fed. He also observed that the multiplication of cells as part of the process “really mimic cancer cells” in the way they grow, another off-putting thought for would-be consumers of the product.
Alvaro is also convinced the public will not buy into any argument that lab-grown meat is more environmentally friendly.
“If people care about the environment, they either try and consume considerably less meat and other animal products, or they go vegan or vegetarian,” he said. “But there are many studies showing that people don’t really care about the environment (to that extent). So I don’t know how you would convince people to do this because of the environment.”
Ben Bramble, a professor at Australian National University who previously held posts at Princeton and Trinity College in Ireland, takes a slightly different tack. He noted that “if lab-grown meat becomes cheaper, healthier, or tastier than regular meat, there will be a large market for it. If it becomes all of these things, it will dominate the market.”
However, Bramble has misgivings about that occurring. He believes a smooth transition from traditionally sourced meat to a lab-grown version would allow humans to elide over the decades of animal cruelty perpetrated by large-scale agriculture, without fully reckoning with and learning from this injustice.
“My fear is that if we all switch over to lab-grown meat because it has become cheaper, healthier, or tastier than regular meat, we might never come to realize what we have done, and the terrible things we are capable of,” he said. “This would be a catastrophe.”
Bramble’s writings about cultured meat also raise some serious moral conundrums. If, for example, animal meat may be cultivated without killing animals, why not create products from human protein?
Actually, that’s already happened.
It occurred in 2019, when Orkan Telhan, a professor of fine arts at the University of Pennsylvania, collaborated with two scientists to create an art exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the future of foodstuffs.
Although the exhibit included bioengineered bread and genetically modified salmon, it was an installation called “Ouroboros Steak” that drew the most attention. That was comprised of pieces of human flesh grown in a lab from cultivated cells and expired blood products obtained from online sources.
The exhibit was presented as four tiny morsels of red meat – shaped in patterns suggesting an ouroboros, a dragon eating its own tail. They were placed in tiny individual saucers atop a larger plate and placemat with a calico pattern, suggesting an item to order in a diner. The artwork drew international headlines – as well as condemnation for Telhan’s vision.
Telhan’s artwork is intended to critique the overarching assumption that lab-grown meat will eventually replace more traditional production methods, as well as the lack of transparency surrounding many processed foodstuffs. “They think that this problem (from industrial-scale agriculture) is going be solved by this new technology,” Telhan said. “I am critical (of) that perspective.”
Unlike Bramble, Telhan is not against lab-grown meat, so long as its producers are transparent about the sourcing of materials and its cultivation. But he believes that large-scale agricultural meat production – which dates back centuries – is not going to be replaced so quickly.
“We see this again and again with different industries, like algae-based fuels. A lot of companies were excited about this, and promoted it,” Telhan said. “And years later, we know these fuels work. But to be able to displace the oil industry means building the infrastructure to scale takes billions of dollars, and nobody has the patience or money to do it.”
Alvaro concurred on this point, which he believes is already weakened because a large swath of consumers aren’t concerned about environmental degradation.
“They’re going to have to sell this big, but in order to convince people to do so, they have to convince them to eat this product instead of regular meat,” Alvaro said.
Hidden Tweaks?
Moreover, if lab-based meat does obtain a significant market share, Telhan suggested companies may do things to the product – such as to genetically modify it to become more profitable – and never notify consumers. That is a particular concern in the U.S., where regulations regarding such modifications are vastly more relaxed than in the European Union.
“I think that they have really good objectives, and they aspire to good objectives,” Telhan said. “But the system itself doesn't really allow for that much transparency.”
No matter what the future holds, sometime next year Carnegie Mellon is expected to hold a press conference announcing it has produced a cut of the world’s most expensive beef with the help of a modified piece of consumer electronics. It will likely take place at around the same time UPSIDE chicken will be available for purchase in supermarkets and restaurants, pending the USDA’s approvals.
Abbott, the Carnegie Mellon professor, suggested the future event will be both informative and celebratory.
“I think Carnegie Mellon would have someone potentially cook it for us,” she said. “Like have a really good chef in New York City do it.”
In this week's Friday Five, breathing this way may cut down on anxiety, a fasting regimen that could make you sick, this type of job makes men more virile, 3D printed hearts could save your life, and the role of metformin in preventing dementia.
The Friday Five covers five stories in research that you may have missed this week. There are plenty of controversies and troubling ethical issues in science – and we get into many of them in our online magazine – but this news roundup focuses on scientific creativity and progress to give you a therapeutic dose of inspiration headed into the weekend.
Here are the promising studies covered in this week's Friday Five, featuring interviews with Dr. David Spiegel, associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, and Dr. Filip Swirski, professor of medicine and cardiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
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Here are the promising studies covered in this week's Friday Five, featuring interviews with Dr. David Spiegel, associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, and Dr. Filip Swirski, professor of medicine and cardiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
- Breathing this way cuts down on anxiety*
- Could your fasting regimen make you sick?
- This type of job makes men more virile
- 3D printed hearts could save your life
- Yet another potential benefit of metformin
* This video with Dr. Andrew Huberman of Stanford shows exactly how to do the breathing practice.