Clones in space: Responses to the Dominion Post science column

At last year’s NZ Skeptics conference Bob Brockie reflected on his career as a newspaper columnist and explained why he has no future with the Mormon Church.

After spending most of my life as a scientist, at the age of 69 I became a weekly science columnist for the Dominion Post and Evening Post. I’ve written about 500 articles now and people ask where I get my stuff from. Mostly I get it from trawling through weekly scientific magazines, from the other side of the world. I like to bring the curious or obscure, gee-whiz stories to public attention.

The media is overrun by stories on climate change, pollution and conservation. I write about anything but those subjects. That’s not news to me; I report other things.

Alien DNA

In 2003 I wrote about an amazing group of people called the Raelians and their claim to have cloned a little girl called Eve. Rael is a French former sports-car journalist who claims he was abducted by little aliens, who told him that 40,000 years ago they came to Earth and produced these little Eve-like creatures. At any moment, the Raelians say, they will present their DNA to the scientific community.

I didn’t get any response from this article from local people, but I did get an invitation from the Australian chapter of the Rael-ians to attend their next gathering three hours north of Sydney, where a white robe would await me.

A pox on alternative practitioners

I often report on experiments to test alternative medicines of one kind or another. One I did was on a fellow who had chicken pox. The doctor told him there was nothing he could do for it, other than staying home and keeping away from people for 10 days. He was a bit of a skeptic and went along to some alternative practitioners. The first one told him his stomach was too acid and gave him some homeopathic water to drink. The second hooked him up to a contraption and told him he had been raped as a child. The third one said he had Ross River fever. They all charged from $50 to $100.

I’ve also written about experiments with acupuncture, which works just as well if you stick the needles in at random.

These pieces invariably attract writers defending the treatment and accusing me of having a closed mind. The disgruntled people usually argue that acupuncture, iridology or homeopathy worked for them or their husband or their wife, and that’s the end of it.

Cosmic energies down on the farm

Then there’s biodynamics. The stars and planets rain down astral energies, which are absorbed through cow’s horns buried in the ground. This radiates out and makes everything grow. The colour of roses is controlled by Venus, and the colour of cornflowers by Saturn. In the Wellington public library there are four copies of Rudolf Steiner’s book, published in the 1920s, and they’re out all the time. Steiner really was the father of organic farming, but the organic people get very angry at me when I point this out. I get an enormous response if I write about Steiner, not only from his followers, but also from organic farmers who think they are above this sort of thing.

Genetic Engineering: yesterday’s issue?

I’ve done three or four articles on genetic engineering over the years, reporting on various experiments. Living in New Zealand you’d think the entire GE field was being closed down, but in fact in all continents of the world it is spreading at a huge rate. The peasants in China and Africa who are producing genetically engineered crops find they don’t have to use so many pesticides. But when I wrote about this in 2001 I got a tremendous response from angry people who wanted to keep New Zealand GE-free. And two years later, the same thing happened. The next time I wrote about it there were not so many letters, and when I wrote a pro-GE article early in 2009 I didn’t receive a single letter. So things have gradually quietened down; GE is no longer the terrible thing that people perceived it to be.

The Mormon blacklist

Generally I try to keep off religion but occasionally I stray in that direction. I got into big trouble when I wrote about the Mormon Church. The Mormons claim that Jesus went to North America and converted the inhabitants to Christianity 2000 years ago. They also believe that the Red Indians are one of the tribes of Israel, although DNA studies show there’s no possible connection.

I wrote about that, but I also found that Joseph Smith, the founder, was a complete rascal and charlatan. He was expelled from the Methodist Church for dealing with necromancy, enchantments and believing in ghosts, and fined for being a disorderly person and impostor. At age 38 a mob of vigilantes enraged by Smith’s arrogance, monetary deals and promiscuity – he ran off with all the best looking girls in the congregation – shot him dead in an Illinois jail. The Mormons of course think he was a martyr to his cause. At any one time the Mormon church is building at least 200 churches around the world.

I thought this was worth reporting, because at the time there were some men on Norfolk Island in trouble with the law for playing up with the girls. I made the mistake of saying it was no wonder they were acting so strangely, because they were all Mormons up there. They were very quick to point out that they were in fact Seventh Day Adventists. I had to write a grovelling apology, but found that I’d been put on the Mormon blacklist. When I consulted the list to see who else was there I saw I was in very good company with all sorts of famous people, including Richard Dawkins. I’m afraid I’ve got no future with the Mormons.

The power of prayer

One of the biggest responses I got was when I wrote about unanswered prayers. America’s Templeton Foundation are very interested in the relationship between science and spirituality; they raised $2.5 million to finance an experiment in which several doctors chose 1800 patients who were due for bypass surgery. They then arranged for a team of people, a mix of Protestants, Catholics and Jews, to pray for half these patients anonymously.

They were alarmed to find that the ones they prayed for did worse than the ones who were not prayed for.

I also mentioned the famous study by Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, who wrote a book about the efficacy of prayer. He asked who gets prayed for most – Queen Victoria of course. She was prayed for every Sunday as were all the sovereign heads of Europe. His figures showed that, despite all the praying, sovereigns lived shorter lives than army officers, traders, merchants, doctors, and the gentry. And he famously concluded that the prayers therefore have no efficacy. Well. The letters still keep coming. I got letters saying that faith can’t be scientifically analysed, that God’s way of working is a mystery, and that science can’t determine the effects of prayer at all. Someone else said people of faith don’t need prayers to know that prayers work. One argued that some of the people having operations would have had extra prayers – they prayed for themselves. Other critics said they had used the wrong prayers, in the wrong language, that they didn’t pray hard enough, or that they didn’t adopt the best posture for saying prayers.

A local priest wrote to me twice, explaining in great detail that there are two sorts of prayers. There are petitionary prayers, where you beg God’s intercession, which hardly ever work, and adorational prayers, where you simply praise God. If you want to get results, he said, do this. Don’t ask for favours. It sounds as if the Muslims are on the right track; all you have to say is God is great. On the scientific evidence, if you’re in line for heart surgery, stop people praying for you.

Tourism on Ararat

In Auckland a couple of years ago two young men developed a system for making maps from satellite imagery. They’d been looking closely at Mt Ararat and some Americans were financing them to go there to see if they could find Noah’s Ark. The story in all the newspapers was all about these pioneers going to a really difficult place, breaking new ground, and how nobody had done this sort of work before. I pointed out that for 2000 years people had been going up Mt Ararat and there are hotels and a monastery up there. There’s a well-worn track; thousands of people go up and down all the time. A whole tourist industry has been developed there.

The difficulty with this, of course, is that no boat can accommodate 5000 species of mammals, 8700 birds, 30,000 worms, and two million insects. The column of beetles would be 240km long, and Noah and his family must have each carried 100 diseases from anthrax to syphilis. How Noah coped with food for the animals, the ventilation, the waste disposal, disembarkation on to a dead Earth, and how the platypus got from Mt Ararat to Australia are all very difficult to explain. A retired clergyman wrote me several, quite substantial letters as a result.

A letter from the Hamster

I’ve written one or two columns on the Creation Museum in Kentucky. In it are depictions of life in the Garden of Eden, and of a happy Adam and Eve, wandering around among the dinosaurs. I gather that 40 percent of Americans believe that humans and dinosaurs were on the Earth at the same time. I produced a column on the museum last year, which generated no response here, but someone at the museum itself must have read it. Ken Ham, the Australian who runs it, was upset. He replied, point by point, to all the mistakes I’d made. I had made one or two mistakes but they were trivial. I said he’d raised US$27 million to build it; he said he didn’t raise the money, a trust raised the money. I said he had a radio station and broadcast stuff around the world; he said he didn’t have a radio station, he just produced programmes. These are run by 287 other radio stations around the world. He wrote a letter to the editor of the paper and suggested I get the sack for my mistakes.

Filthy sex aids and the end of the world

I once wrote about the beginning of the world, and got an 11-page letter telling me when the world is going to end. The letter was from none other than God and his wife. They told me that the Earth would end shortly before January 31 in the year 5000. Owing to the mental and physical condition of humanity and filthy sex aids, mankind become unable to reproduce about then. There was lots of other advice as well, about divorce and the number 7777 and how the true church is the Salvation Army. Sadly, I couldn’t reply to God, because there was no forwarding address. I did notice it was sent from a post office down in Manners St, Wellington, however.

Scientific gossip

Why do I write this stuff? Well, $170 a week is very welcome, but I think that a vast amount of science goes unreported, and it gives me quite a buzz to bring news of this. I feel a bit like a postman, bringing news of developments and scientific gossip to the public. Also, there’s a sense of obligation to the public who paid for me to work as a scientist for most of my life. I feel a duty to let them know what they’re getting for their money. We’re floating around in a miasma of superstition, with people believing preposterous things with great intensity. I can’t help but challenge them in some way: ask them, how can you justify this, where do you get these ideas from?

I derive a lot of joy from writing these articles. It’s very different from writing for scientific journals. There you sweat blood and tears and produce a piece, which is then published years after you submitted it. Eighteen months later somebody in Mozambique or the Canary Islands asks for a reprint. With these newspaper articles I write it today and it’s published tomorrow. And people are on the phone or writing complaining letters the next day.

Loose Talk from an Old Smoothie

Bob Brockie samples a health food that saw the dinosaurs come and go

We’ve all seen the claims – Spirulina! Nature’s Health Solution! The World’s Healthiest Superfood! Soulfood!
“Spirulina – the ancient blue-green micro-algae found growing in the lakes of Africa and Central and South America, derives its energy directly from the sun, contains 100 nutrients, is a rich source of iron, is extremely alkalising, energy-packed, supports the maintenance of the beneficial gut flora, is rich in antioxidants, contains 65% protein, etc.” Many firms claim that Spirulina “will reduce diabetes, cancer, hives, cataracts, wrinkles, anaemia, eczema, HIV, hypertension, detoxify the kidneys, help balance your RNA and DNA nucleic acids, and protect you against radiation.”

Small wonder that huge volumes of this cure-all are drunk or eaten daily. One US firm sells over $50 million worth of Spirulina every year. But most chemists and medicos think these claims are laughable.

“Found growing in the lakes of Africa and Central and South America?” Yes, this is true but Spirulina also grows in almost any stagnant fresh or brackish pool near you in New Zealand. Nevertheless, a lot of the Spirulina sold in New Zealand is produced in industrial vats in the US.

As for the nutritional claims – the same could be said about almost any green vegetable on Earth. Spinach or broccoli also contain 100 nutrients, are a rich source of iron and vitamins, are extremely alkalising in the stomach, support the maintenance of the beneficial gut flora, and are rich in antioxidants. If you want protein it’s cheaper to eat an egg, which is 87% protein. And what’s this? “Spirulina contains antioxidant ammunition in the form of the enzyme Superoxide dismutase!” Nobody can deny this but it’s a silly claim. Superoxide dismutase is the most abundant enzyme in the world. Every green plant is full of the stuff.

To be really pedantic, Spirulina is not an alga at all, it’s a bacterium. Ancient? Yes. Because Spirulina has a long fossil history it is often promoted as a “Dinosaur Drink”. “It must be good for you because it’s so old” but the promotion people got the date wrong. Spirulina was around 600 million years before dinosaurs trod the Earth. We should call it “The Proterozoic Drink”.

Raw Spirulina tastes vile, which is why Spirulina smoothies must be masked with pureed banana, kiwifruit and apricot. These additives provide more energy and vitamins than the Spirulina itself.

Who’s for a broccoli smoothie?
Originally published in the Dominion Post, 11 November 2002

The Prehistoric Boy Racer Gene

Bob Brockie thinks he can explain why the Skeptic editor gets woken up at 2am every Saturday morning

Doctors have a name for impulsive, over-energetic, risky, unpredictable, posturing, defiant behaviour — they call it ADHD (attention deficit hyper-active disorder) and it affects mainly boys.

About 12 years ago geneticists discovered a gene which “contributes” to this naughty behaviour. Nearly half the impulsive naughty boys in the US have this so-called “7R” gene.

Geneticists know that this gene is very ancient and think we may have inherited it from apes. The risk-taking behaviour may have helped prehistoric hunter-gatherers to survive, but once people settled down and became farmers, the impulsive behaviour became in-appropriate and socially disruptive.

Paradoxically, the gene has become commoner in some parts of the world over the last 10,000 years. Now a Dr Chen leads a team of Californian geneticists who suggest this is because risk-taking people left their ancestral Africa and China to migrate long distances, taking their overdrive genes and unpredictable behaviour with them. Dr Chen sampled 39 communities round the world and fiound that the risk-takers have migrated to the ends of the Earth where their 7R genes now concentrate.

His team found that nearly all the Yanomamo men up the Amazon and those ferocious guys in New Guinea have the gene. These blokes live in a state of local aggressive anarchy, spend all day adorning themselves and posturing, sharpening their elaborate weapons, and eating and sleeping separately from their hard-working women.

By contrast, Dr Chen’s team found the risk-taking gene was rare or totally absent among Kalahari bushmen and Chinese farmers. These long-settled men live peaceably, don’t make fancy weaponry or show off. They help rear their children and share everything with their wives. No wonder the Yanomamo are known as “The Fierce People” and the bushmen as “The Gentle People”. Europeans and other Africans fall somewhere in between these extremes.

And what about us? Whether Polynesian or Pakeha, we New Zealanders are all descended from long distance risk-taking migrants. If Dr Chen’s theory is right, our boys should be awash with the 7R gene.

My impression is that we have plenty of defiant, risk-taking, hyperactive boys. Just what we need to play rugby. And what about our boy racers, all those kids sent home from school for disruptive behaviour, and our 12,000 kids on Ritalin, the drug used to treat the condition?

Enough of this armchair theorising. Some geneticist will have to go out and survey our youths’ 7R genes. Our boy racer genes.
Originally published in the Dominion Post, July 22, 2002

Three Rules for Sticking Needles in People

Bob Brockie gets himself a qualification in acupuncture

Last year a healthy anaesthesiologist, Dr Kinsinger, visited nine chiropractors in Oklahoma, claiming that his chest or back were playing up. All nine chiropractors misdiagnosed some kind of illness including appendicitis, misplaced bones or shifting ribs. Clearly, these guys had no idea of what they were doing, falling well short of conventional medical standards.

Back here, I once attended a Skeptics Society demonstration at Massey University. There, a medical doctor showed us how to make homeopathic concoctions by running a few drops of fluorescent dye along a row of 20 glass flasks filled with distilled water. He diluted, diluted and further diluted the mix until, by the 20th flask, there was theoretically not a molecule of the dye left — only distilled water.

In making their concoctions homeopaths do the same thing but with the juice of lawn daisies, onions, snake venom, sepia ink, sulphur and the like. They dilute the stuff until not a molecule remains in their 20th, 30th or 200th flasks, only distilled water. This is what they sell you, claiming that their remedies cure or relieve anything from asthma and infertility to fear of flying.

Most scientists and doctors are very dubious about these claims because they fly in the face of a basic chemical “Law of Mass Action”. The law says if you want to intensify a chemical reaction, add more chemicals. If you want to weaken a reaction, dilute the chemical.

At a later demonstration, another medical doctor and one-time acupuncturist showed us how to become an acupuncturist. “You need know only three rules.” He said. “One: Keep your needles clean. Two: Never stick needles into very fat people and Three: If a patient is really sick, send them to a proper doctor.” After 20 minutes’ instruction we were all given certificates, mine countersigned by a distinguished physician, certifying that we were all now acupuncturists. Again, endless medical trials show that acupuncture doesn’t work. One survey of almost 200 American acupuncturists revealed 132 cases of fainting, 26 cases of increased pain, eight cases of punctured lungs and 45 other adverse results in their patients.

Naturopaths claim they can rid your body of toxins and increase your “vital force”. The entire discipline of organic chemistry refutes this nonsense.

Scientific and medical trials of these four disciplines reveal that their short-term successes depend not on the treatments but on placebo effects.

If you want to know more about these fraudulent shenanigans go to Quackwatch or to the US or Australian National Councils Against Health Fraud on the web.

Originally published in the Dominion Post, 19 January, 2004

Rudolph Steiner’s Advice to Farmers

Bob Brockie considers the enduring influence of the founder of Anthroposophy

Down on the farm, Rudolf Steiner taught that our forbears lived on the continents of Atlantis (which sank beneath the Atlantic) and Lemuria (which we shared with lemurs until it sank beneath the Indian Ocean).

Men were supersensible and god-like in those days, their thoughts soaring among the stars. Unfortunately, Lucifer and pernicious scientists like Sir Isaac Newton took away our innocence and filled our heads with poisonous nonsense. We are now the degenerate descendants of those far-off happy people but, if we follow Steiner’s precepts, we can regain our innocence, learn again how to soar among the stars, and speak to the dead in the forthcoming Age of Aquarius.

Steiner had something profound to say about most things — coffee, architecture, the banking system, dancing, and agriculture. In 1923 Steiner explained to some Silesian farmers: “If you want to know how beetroot grows you must understand not only what happens in the Earth but in the whole cosmos, for the sun the moon and the planets contain an inner principle of life which controls chemicals on Earth.”

Steiner had a poor view of scientists “who deal with only the corpse of chemistry and not the living substance.” He said, “Only spiritually prepared people understand the living spirit of chemistry.” In the soil, Steiner told his farmers, carbon bore creative and cosmic pictures and sublime imaginations; nitrogen sensed whether there is enough water in a district, and limestone was under the power of the moon, Mercury and Venus.

The planets beam astral energies down on the Earth where these forces can be harnessed by cows’ horns buried in the soil. The horns must be filled with quartz crystals to absorb the astro-ethereal energies, which are then rayed out into the living mystical soil.

To get rid of mice, Steiner recommended that farmers catch one when Venus was in Scorpio, burn its skin and sprinkle its ashes over the fields. This will “negate the reproductive power of the mice…”

He explained that farms were like living organisms, where water played the same role as blood in our bodies. If farmers wanted to potentise their water with cosmic energy, they had to pump, pulse and purify it, as did the heart.

You’d think that this claptrap would have died with Steiner, but No! Emigré continentals brought his ideas and practices to New Zealand where they provide the mainspring and scientific underpinning for biodynamic farming!

Originally published in the Dominion, 6 August, 2001

Kary Mullis and the King of Sweden

Bob Brockie looks at the link between genius and eccentricity

When the Californian surfer Kary Mullis was introduced to the King of Sweden he said, “I believe you’re having problems with your daughter, the 16-year-old princess. I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m sure she’ll grow out of it. In fact I’m so confident that I’m willing to offer my son in marriage, in exchange for a third of your kingdom.”

What was the occasion? 1993, Stockholm, and Kary Mullis was being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Subsequently, Nobelist Mullis has distinguished himself in many ways. He was a specialist adviser in the O J Simpson trial, claims to have been abducted by aliens, communicated by telepathy, and spoken to a talking racoon. At a large and august scientific congress in Europe, Mullis’ only slides were of naked women. They did not invite him back.

The colourful behaviour goes along with a brilliant mind, for Mullis it was who discovered how to multiply up molecules of DNA. He had his eureka experience with his girlfriend asleep on his shoulder as he drove along a Californian highway at dusk in 1983. His clever idea and methodology has transformed the worlds of biology, medicine and forensics.

You will know that, these days, a single molecule of DNA from a crime scene can nail a criminal. Put the molecule into one of Kary Mullis’ black boxes and the machine will make 2, 4, 8, 16 … millions of copies of DNA in a few hours — enough to perform a battery of identity tests.

A local woman was recently shocked and horrified to learn that an out-of-control scientist was making copies of human DNA right here in New Zealand! So shocked that she wrote to the newspaper. Her indignation shows how far apart are scientists and the general public. Madam, local technicians have been multiplying up human DNA here for over 12 years. Throughout New Zealand scores of Mullis black boxes are running at this very minute amplifying human DNA as a matter of course. It has become a standard diagnostic technique in medical laboratories. Mullis’ method is also widely used to multiply up the fragmentary DNA remains of mummies, moas, the fossil bones of Easter Islanders and Neandertal people.

The patent rights to Mullis’ technique were sold to a Swiss drug firm for $300 million. Had the King of Sweden known this he might have taken Mullis’ offer more seriously.

Most of the $300 million went to the firm employing Kary Mullis, but he is not exactly a poor man.

Originally published in the Dominion, 17 September 2001

Psychologists Not Suited to Court Work

Should we trust psychologists and psychiatrists, especially as expert witnesses in court cases?

This is an important question because, depending on their opinions, a person can inherit vast sums of money, lose custody of a child, be tried for murder or shut away for life in gaol or an asylum.

Two American psychologists, Jay Ziskin and David Faust, have looked at the performance of their own profession with a scientific eye and think they have good reason to question the accuracy of their colleagues’ opinions in courts. They point to several famous experiments.

In one study, several psychologists examined the same group of mental patients. The experts disagreed on the patients’ diagnoses, motivations or conflicts, and their conscious and unconscious feelings more often than they agreed on these things.

In other experiments, professional psychologists did no better than office secretaries in recognizing people with damaged brains, and few clinicians could distinguish between people with real brain damage and those only pretending. More studies showed that children feigning brain damage fooled most practitioners and professional psychologists did no better than high school students in predicting violent behaviour.

Several studies showed that psychiatric judgment did not improve with wide experience or special qualifications. Highly qualified old psychiatrists were no better than novices in spotting the presence, location or cause of brain damage.

Drs Faust and Ziskin think that many of these experts are ill fitted to work on criminal courts for two reasons. In their day-to-day work, psychologists and psychiatrists have an ingrained tendency to help and sympathise with their patients. But in the unfamiliar arena of the court they must do something quite different — uncover truth whatever the implications are for the accused, so their judgment is often clouded.

Another reason for their failure is because their disciplines are not yet true sciences. Human thought and behaviour still resist objective, direct, reliable observation and measurement, so clinicians can make few accurate predictions. In the place of science, psychology has only loosely bound conjectures — dozens of fash-ionable personality theories and hundreds of ever-changing approaches to psychotherapy. New theory may not be better, only a fresh attempt to resolve a recalcitrant problem.

Check this out in Jay Ziskin and David Faust’s three-volume Coping with Psychiatric and Psychological Testimony. Fifth Edition 1997. Nothing here about New Zealand psychologists and psychiatrists who are, of course, a cut or two above their American counterparts.

Originally published in the Dominion Post, January 26, 2003. A book of Bob Brockie’s collected columns is being released August 2003.