Life in the Pandemic X: Exacerbating uncertainty

 Many things in life are uncertain (apart from death and taxes obviously). And many things are uncertain in science. Indeed identifying, controlling and quantifying uncertainty is a key aspect of the practice of science. We’re so keenly aware of uncertainty that we try to dissuade students of talking about science “proving” things, as though in any given situation absolutely all uncertainty can be removed. We don’t think that it can be, and we can therefore never be “certain”. What we seek to do is accumulate evidence supporting a particular explanation for a given phenomenon so that it moves from being highly provisional (a hypothesis), to being fairly probably the correct explanation (a supported hypothesis), to being the best and most highly supported explanation we have (at which point it’s  usually elevated to the status of a theory). This takes time and effort. Even so, we also accept that the most accepted theory, with apparently lots of supporting evidence, can always be superseded by a new theory. This might be an extension of the original theory, or indeed a contradiction of it. But this whole approach raises  problems. It is tricky to explain (as you may have noticed), and it’s not the way most people think or speak most of the time. These problems (and why they matter) have been amply exposed by the pandemic.

Let’s start with the language problem. There are situations where certainty is conflated with clarity. In a startling reversal of form for the particular bunch of politicians currently running the UK, the pandemic mantra has been “We’re following the science, therefore….”. This is a reversal because it suited them in a previous situation (ie the Brexit debate), to downplay the view of “experts”. But as I’ve noted before, in the pandemic, this has changed. Experts are in; but uncertainty is not out.

Politicians and the media, are very keen on what they call clarity. But COVID19 is a virus new to  humans, and therefore new to science. Nothing was known, indeed could be known, about it (although things could be inferred). Early in the pandemic, at the time when many key decisions were being taken, the science was more than usually uncertain, and therefore the scientific advice to politicians had to be highly caveated (this is an assumption on my part, I wasn’t privy to it). But this doesn’t make for snappy press conferences. And it almost certainly guaranteed that the advice would change, and therefore the instructions issued by politicians would have to change (example: face masks). The media don’t particularly help in such situations. Their stock in trade is the language of u-turn and climb-down. It might have been wise to clearly communicate from the start that the course of action being embarked upon was based on a consensus of what, given the evidence at the time, was reasonable. Not certain, but reasonable. Problem is, would any of us reacted as we need to if the politicians had spoken this way?

To be fair to them, there have been some sceptics and deniers who have been happy to jump up and down and accuse them of exaggerating the danger of the situation for nefarious political ends. They have pointed out that for all the talk of half a million UK dead and the NHS overwhelmed, this was not the disaster that developed. But this is to miss the point. The one experiment that could not be done was the one that involved doing nothing and essentially letting COVID19 run its course. So on the basis of (suitably caveated) advice, we had our lockdown. And while we can’t be certain (that is, after all, the point I’m making), the difference in case and death curves (eg see here) between most EU countries (including the UK) and others like the US and Brazil, suggests that this was indeed a sensible course of action. As an aside, we have to now hope that we don’t blow it, and revert to the earlier trajectory that could lead to disaster. However, at least some of the critics seem to suggest that with all the uncertainty involved, essentially nothing should have been done. Action should only have been taken once all doubt had been removed. But then that would have meant nothing would have been done. And many thousands more would have died, deaths that we have almost certainly avoided. It will perhaps be possible to demonstrate this statistically, once more  evidence has accumulated. But at the point the big political and economic decisions had to be taken, actual evidence was scarce.

We have heard this sort of call to wait for certainty before, both in another contemporary context and historically. And it’s here that the language problem, and the complexity problem intersect. Climate change, its cause, effects and what we should do about it (if we can do anything about it), is undoubtedly complex. The idea that it is caused by human activity (primarily the burning of fossil fuels from the industrial revolution on, increasing atmospheric CO₂) has been a matter of overwhelming scientific consensus for decades ie we’ve gone beyond hypothesis, supported hypothesis, and theory to consensus. Even still, scientists in this area will probably be unwilling to say they have no doubts, that the relevant theory/theories have been “proved” in some absolute sense. That’s just not the appropriate language of science. But that allows others to come along and say that the science is uncertain, there are alternative explanations or the whole thing is just a hoax. Here, a legal analogy might help.

I served on a murder jury some years ago. We were faced with the weighty decision of whether the prosecution had proved its case beyond reasonable doubt. Notice that you can still convict and have doubt. The question is whether the case is proved beyond reasonable doubt. One can always come up with lots of “could be’s” and “might have beens”. But if they fly in the face of the evidence, or are not supported by evidence, then they are not reasonable. And if they are not reasonable, they is no reason to pronounce the defendant “not guilty”. If the scientific consensus around climate change were a defendant in the dock, although there are doubts and uncertainties, they would be ruled out by the evidence as unreasonable, a guilty verdict handed down, and the jury would go away and sleep soundly, their duty done. And yet the uncertainty, complexity, and the language of science conspire to provide a space for those who say we should do nothing because we are not 100% certain, precisely at the time when action has to be taken.

At least some who operate in this space are following in a fairly inglorious tradition that has been exposed several times. They seek to foment doubt and increase complexity, obfuscate evidence and exacerbate uncertainty. They explicitly seek to sow doubt, of the unreasonable sort. The approach was famously summarised by a cigarette company executive in the 1960’s in a now infamous memo which stated “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.”(1). What followed was essentially a well funded disinformation campaign of epic proportions. Meanwhile, cigarettes continued to be manufactured, sold and consumed and contributed to the early deaths of millions. The story of this and similar campaigns is expertly revealed in its gory detail by David Michaels in his books (2,3). And there’s evidence that there are commercial and other interests playing the same game with climate change. Stir up doubt, exacerbate the uncertainty, and the public will conclude that either the issues are so complicated and unclear that it would be premature to take action (like ban smoking or increase tax on gas guzzlers), or that the inconvenience of action is not worth uncertain benefits.

This kind of thing is happening in the pandemic. Reasonable people are not taking reasonable actions because, particularly in the US, misinformation is being spread and uncertainty is being exacerbated. The scary bit is that when the much hoped-for vaccine becomes available, we all know it’s likely to start over vaccination against COVID19. But, to resort to some unscientific language, you can be sure that wearing a mask and washing your hands frequently at the moment, and getting vaccinated once one or more vaccines have passed through the requisite trials, is a really good idea. I don’t doubt it.

 1. Michaels D (2005) Doubt is their product. Scientific American 292(6):96-101 (available on Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7806937_Doubt_Is_Their_Product)

 2. Michaels D (2008) Doubt is Their Product. Oxford Univ. Press

 3. Michaels D (2020 )The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception Oxford Univ. Press

Cold fusion and hot money

It turns out that we’ve just passed the 30^th anniversary of the announcement of the most revolutionary of scientific discoveries. On 23^rd March, 1989 Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons held a press conference (you can still see it on YouTube) and told the world that they had found a relatively simple way of producing nuclear fusion, the process that fuels stars and very large explosions. Decades and tens of billions of dollars had been spent on finding a way of doing this on earth in a controlled way in order to generate clean energy at minimal cost (the irony!). Fleischmann and Pons (who for brevity I’ll call F & P), claimed they could do it in a test tube with some fancy electrodes, an electric current and water. The process was called “cold fusion” and the reason you’ve probably never have heard of it is, of course, that it quickly turned out that they hadn’t discovered anything of the sort.

It’s hard to overstate the potential implications of their “discovery”. Abundant, cheap, clean energy – imagine the impact that would have had on climate change and the carbon crisis. And it didn’t take long for the notion that cold fusion might have military and strategic applications to start exercising the minds of governments across the globe. In the US, where the announcement was made (F & P conducted their experiments at the university of Utah, where Pons was chairman of the Chemistry department) the Department of Energy went into overdrive.  It ordered its labs to find out if the claims were true, diverting teams of scientists from their own projects. Weekly meetings were convened and reports sent to Washington to the Secretary for Energy. Eventually the President was briefed. This was serious stuff.

The scientific community at large was desperate for details of F & P’s experiment. At the time of their press conference they hadn’t published any of their results, although they had submitted a paper to the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry. The Editor understood well the potential importance of their results and fast-tracked the paper through the peer review process. However, when it was published it was relatively short, lacked detail and contained a number of errors. A paper that was submitted to Nature was withdrawn. Very quickly it began to emerge that the initial claims were wrong, the result not so much of fraud or mendacity, but sloppy science, lack of precision and over interpretation. The following year a paper was published reporting results obtained using exactly the same equipment as in the original experiment – no evidence of cold fusion was found. And there you might have though the story would have ended. Interesting to historians or science, but really just a footnote that the rest of us could forget. But then there is the money.

Money, it turns out, is involved in this story from the beginning. The University of Utah quickly had its patent lawyers on the case, and quickly devoted $5M to support cold fusion research. It also lobbied the US Government for tens of millions more dollars for the research (an effort that was unsuccessful). Industry, private equity and philanthropy got involved. By 1992 F & P were in France working with a Toyota subsidiary, an effort that eventually burned through $12M dollars and ended in 1998. Well after mainstream science had moved on, pockets of researchers in both government and private labs continued to beaver away at cold fusion (and still do). There has been no fusion success, although it’s arguable that there might have been some useful spin-offs.

The money kept flowing. Google, no less, spent another $10M on cold fusion research, between 2015 and 2019, announcing only just last week the end of its efforts  (see this commentary in Nature).  It was reported in the Financial Times that a company in North Carolina, founded by a businessman with a background in brickmaking, had attracted upwards of $100M  to develop, you’ve guessed it, cold fusion (although these days it tends to be called “low-energy nuclear reactions”).  Money came from a range of funds and groups. It’s genuinely difficult to tell the grifters from the marks, who are the dupes and who are the gamblers. Somebody appears to making a living (if not useful quantities of electricity) out of the remains of F & P’s ideas.

It turns out that real scientific revolutions are scarce. And they are often only recognised long after the revolution has occurred. Scientific revolutions that have big practical impacts on society, that lead to radical transformations in what and how we do things are even rarer, and usually come from long years of hard slog rather than eureka moments. It’s said of financial advertising that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. The same is true of scientific claims, particularly those made in press conferences. But it would appear there are gullible people out there, and some of them are minted.

Scientists are human (yes it’s true!) and like most humans we are not immune to influences from outside the lab, from journalists, university administrators, patent lawyers, governments, investors et al. The priority of journalists (for whose benefit press conferences are run), particularly those who have a poor understanding of science, is to simplify and categorise information in the best way get their efforts into news bulletins or prominent pages in the publications they write for. It’s not that they are uninterested in accuracy and precision just that it’s not at the top of their priority list. So we should withstand the temptation of the quick, easy, simple story, and wait for the boring slog of control experiments, confirmation and replication. With cold fusion that’s what happened, and quite quickly. Just not quickly enough for F & P.

While not entirely victims, I do feel a tad of sympathy for F & P. They took the heat (if you’ll allow me to mix my metaphors) that others, who were probably more deserving, escaped. They were the focus of that now infamous press conference. We all marched to the top of the hill with them, before tumbling down the other side. But they then got steamrollered. Many of us, placed under the pressure they found themselves under, might have made some of the poor choices they made. The warning of Proverbs 14:12 comes to mind.