On Friday, Mr Litlove fell off his bike on his journey to work. He was rounding a corner when the bike slowly slipped from under him, and it wasn’t until he was on the ground that he saw the sheet ice. A couple of builders working nearby came over to check on him, but by then Mr Litlove was back on his feet and brushing himself down and being thankful he hadn’t broken any bones. He’d bruised his ribs and his hip, though, and when he limped in on Friday evening after work, he was clearly a man who had sustained injury and wanted some sympathy. Need I say more?
‘So you won’t be going rowing in the morning, then?’ I asked him.
Mr Litlove’s eyes slid away from mine. ‘I expect I’ll be fine,’ he said.
And so of course, the stubbornness of the male being unparalleled, he was up at 6 am and off to the river. And then we went out to lunch, so it’s possible that he overdid things a tad because by Sunday he was very stiff and sore indeed.
I was expecting a skype call with our son that morning. He has an essay paper to do this year and I offered to lend a hand, given that he’s not written one in several years. The topic is science communication, which turns out to be rather fascinating. It’s a jolly good idea for the public to have some notion of what science is up to, but as with all these vague mission statements, things become tricky when we actually get down to nuts and bolts. How much information do we need to have any sort of useful judgment about current developments in science and technology? Who needs to know? And who is going to tell us in the ‘right’ way? When scientists talk about public understanding, what they often mean is public appreciation – getting the power of mass influence behind their research in order to secure more funding. Whereas what often happens is panic or aversion thanks to sensationalist and inaccurate media stories.
Let me give you a little example of some of the issues involved. Back in the 1950s a medical researcher, Alice Stewart, started to collate the figures on infant deaths by leukemia in women who had been x-rayed during pregancy. The statistics spoke for themselves; up to a child a week was dying from the disease and the mortality rate was almost 40% higher in children whose mothers had been x-rayed. Stewart published her findings in the Lancet in ’56, in the British Medical Journal in ’58 and yet the Medical Research Council absolutely refused to accept her conclusions. Stewart was a lone female voice without the backing of a large organisation. Doctors were in love with the technology, which they believed could only be useful. They were unwilling to take any one else’s word on a problem they had not identified themselves – the more authority at stake, the more unwilling people are generally to admit mistakes. And finally, they believed that as doctors they were always healing people; they simply could not hear the opposite. Too many cherished assumptions needed to be overturned and so for the next 25 YEARS doctors continued with the x-rays, and thousands of children died.
Science needs to be in the public eye, because keen public observation keeps people more honest. And the general public is a useful moral barometer, reacting strongly when science moves into territories where ethical issues are complex. But then we have to think about the scares over the MMR vaccine, which were sparked by one set of results that have since been called into question. The real problem is in the calculation of risk, which we are not encouraged by the media to do with any pragmatism. And anyhow, when our health or that of loved ones is at stake, it’s hard to be cool-headed.
I have an interesting calculation of risk of my own underway at the moment. Last week an invitation from the NHS popped through my letterbox to attend a cervical smear test. Oh joy. It’s not the test itself that bothers me, it’s the inaccuracy of the results. One in twenty women screened will register a false positive and have to go through an unpleasant medical procedure in consequence. One in twenty is a lot. On any given day, assuming a 50/50 gender split, ten women will read this blog who have been scared and treated invasively for no reason at all. I’m tending to agree with Germaine Greer on this one.
I readily confess that I am not good with medical procedures – a touch phobic, for sure. And I am terrified by the prospect of falling ill again, having so recently regained (most of) my health from the worst of chronic fatigue. Am I sensible about this? No, of course not. I had a bad viral illness and it took me 13 years to get over it. How could I possibly be sensible after that? But I know for sure that the stress and anxiety over the test and a false positive result would result in another stretch of chronic fatigue for me. More months lost to illness, when I’ve lost too many already.
Don’t worry; I am the least reckless person you’ll ever meet and I daresay I’ll go and talk it through with my nice doctor. But I have a little fable involving Mr Litlove to tell you about. When I expressed my displeasure at the arrival of the summons, Mr Litlove sighed and clearly wanted to say something he thought better of.
‘You think I should go and have it, don’t you?’ I asked.
‘Well yes, I suppose you should just get it over with,’ he replied.
‘You men should try it once in a while. Some sort of unpleasant, embarrassing test with an uncertain outcome. Something that involves shaving your balls and having them weighed or some such. How many men would do that?’
‘Oh don’t make me laugh,’ said Mr Litlove, clutching his sore ribs. ‘Please don’t. It hurts.’
‘And that reminds me. If those ribs are no better on Monday morning, you should go to the hospital and get an x-ray.’
The look on his face was transparent. It said: NO WAY.
‘Casualty won’t be too bad on Monday morning, I expect.’
‘My sister’s coming to stay on Monday,’ Mr Litlove mumbled. ‘I’ll ask her.’
Back in the day his sister was a GP and now works in academia in public health, none of which to my knowledge has gifted her with x-ray vision. But this is typical. He’ll tell me soon enough what to do, but he’d rather walk around with cracked ribs than go to a doctor. What has understanding science got to do with our behavioural choices, I wonder?
