This is a longer than usual post because most of it is a transcript from a book I am reading. Suffice to say that so far it has all the makings of being the best book I have read for decades! So, since I took the trouble to laboriously hand-type this extract you can - you will! - all bloody well read it and inwardly digest! The book is entitled:
It is written by a chap called Idan Ben-Barak who is obviously Jewish and obviously jam-packed full of brains and intelligence, er, despite the fact that he chooses to live in Australia - yeeeeeees, quite, eccentric or what?! (Just kidding, Dame Andra, honest!) I do not intend to say too much about his book at this stage because I am only part way through it and I intend to bore you all educate you all when I have finished it. Suffice to say that it is concerned with the auto-immune system in the human body which, let me tell you, alone constitutes the eighth, ninth, tenth ... up to twentieth, Wonders of the World!
But that is not my main concern today. What struck me was what amounts almost to an aside on the scientific method as practiced today. Ben-Barak makes no connection - but I do. This extract should be typed out by every practicing 'Global Warmer' and then they should then be forced to eat it!
When I was at uni, I took a course called “Breakthroughs in Microbiology”. There were about a dozen students, and each of us was randomly assigned a different seminal microbiology paper, on which we had to present a short talk. Nearly all of the papers were decades old, which to me, back then, meant they weren’t very interesting(*), and so I rejoiced to see that the paper I’d been allocated was only a few years old. Virtually hot off the press! (*) Scientists nowadays often regard any research that is more than about five years old as practically obsolete. At the pace modern science is advancing, it’s all you can do to keep up with the accumulating data. Like many students, I absorbed this attitude uncritically. I’m a little less stupid about it now. Virtually hot off the press! And published in the esteemed journal Nature, no less. The subject was Toll-like receptors (TLRs), which are molecules found oncells of the immune system. The paper showed that one type of TLR, named TLR2, was responsible for identifying a type of molecule that almost all bacteria have on their outer coat, but non-bacterial cells never do. It’s known as lipolysaccheride (LPS). So when TLR2 senses the presence of LPS, it’s a safe bet that bacteria are afoot, and an immune response is necessary.
So far, so good. I read the paper, summarised the findings, and went forth to find a few more recent papers on the subject so that I could provide background and context for my talk, like a good little student. But there I ran into trouble: something was amiss, and I couldn’t tell exactly what. The papers I was reading seemed to be saying weird things that wouldn’t settle neatly into my talk. Several frustrating weeks later, I figured out the cause of my confusion: the other papers were weird because they were directly contradicting my assigned Nature paper. TLR2 doesn’t detect LPS at all; that was an error. A different Toll-like receptor, TLR4, is the one that detects LPS. I know it doesn’t sound much when I put it like that, but this little fact was worth the 2011 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
The Nature experimenters weren’t careful enough. The LPS solution they used wasn’t sufficiently purified and was contaminated with a tiny amount of other bacterial elements, and these contaminants were the ones that provoked the TLR2 reaction. Our course lecturer, that crafty old devil, deliberately gave out an erroneous paper to demonstrate the fallibility of scientific papers (I never worked up the nerve to tell him just how awesome I thought that was.)
This paper wasn’t some sensationalist survey creatively misreported in the science news of a local newspaper. This was serious, respectable research published in Nature, and it was wrong. It took me a while to rid myself of the shudders conjured by the what-if scenario: what if I hadn’t caught on to what was going on? I’d have delivered the talk as if the paper was correct, making a proper fool of myself, and would most likely have had my arse handed to me on a plate. Research, even research published in prestigious journals, can and does produce errors. It’s something every scientist ultimately learns one way or another, and this was a good way of learning it: in a classroom rather than in the real world of research.
If I hear or read one more 'Warmer' telling me that I don't understand the 'scientific method' and that all their papers are 'peer reviewed' and published in the very best scientific magazines, I'll ram Ben-Barak's book up them where the sun don't shine and then set light to it. See how they like that for 'warming'!
