Category Archives: Political

Let’s speed up the rate at which we recognise our female chemists

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A little while back now I was researching my post on water when I came across a scientist which I hadn’t heard of before. And that was odd, because this person was one of the first to propose the idea of catalysis, which is a pretty important concept in chemistry, in fact, in science in general. Surely the name should be at least a bit familiar. Shouldn’t it?

And yet it wasn’t, and the more I read, the more surprised I was. Not only was this person clearly a brilliant thinker, they were also remarkably prescient.

Elizabeth Fulhame’s book was first published in 1794 (image by the Science History Institute, Public Domain)

So who was it? Her name was Elizabeth Fulhame, and we know very little about her, all things considered. Look her up and you won’t find any portraits, or even her exact dates of birth and death, despite the fact that her book, An Essay on
Combustion, was published in more than one country and she, a Scottish woman, was made an honorary member of the Philadelphia Chemical Society in 1810 — remarkable achievements for the time.

As well as describing catalytic reactions for the first time, that book — first published in 1794 and surprisingly still available today — also contains a preface which includes the following:

But censure is perhaps inevitable; for some are so ignorant,
that they grow sullen and silent, and are chilled with horror
at the sight of any thing, that bears the semblance of learning,
in whatever shape it may appear; and should the spectre
appear in the shape of a woman, the pangs, which they suffer,
are truly dismal.

Obviously women are interested in physics. And also, apparently, in staring wistfully into open vacuum chambers whilst wearing unnecessary PPE (stock photos are great, aren’t they?)

Fulhame clearly did not suffer fools gladly (I think I would’ve liked her), and had also run across a number of people who felt that women were not capable of studying the sciences.

Tragically, 225 years later, this attitude still has not entirely gone away. Witness, for example, the recent article featuring an interview with Alessandro Strumia, in which he claimed that women simply don’t like physics. There were naturally a number of excellent rebuttals to this ludicrous claim, not least a brilliant annotated version of the article by Shannon Palus — which I recommend because, firstly, not behind a paywall and secondly, very funny.

Unfortunately, despite the acclaim she received at the time, Fulhame was later largely forgotten. One scientist who often gets the credit for “discovering” catalysis is Berzelius. There is no doubt that he was a remarkable chemist (you have him to thank for chemical notation, for starters), but he was a mere 15 years old when Fulhame published her book.

The RSC’s Breaking the Barriers report was published in 2018

In November last year, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) launched its ‘Breaking the Barriers’ report, outlining issues surrounding women’s retention and progression in academia. As part of this project, they commissioned an interview with Professor Marina Resmini, Head of the Chemistry Department at Queen Mary University of London.

She pointed out that today there is an almost an equal gender split in students studying chemistry at undergraduate level in the United Kingdom, but admitted that there is still much to be done, saying:

“The two recent RSC reports ‘Diversity Landscape of the Chemical Sciences’ and ‘Breaking the Barriers’ have highlighted some of the key issues. Although nearly 50% of undergraduate students studying to become chemists are female, the numbers reaching positions of seniority are considerably less.”

Professor Resmini was keen to stress that there are many supportive men in academia, and that’s something we mustn’t forget. Indeed, this was true even in Fulhame’s time. Thomas P. Smith, a member of the Philadelphia Chemical Society’s organizing committee, applauded her work, saying “Mrs. Fulham has now laid such bold claims to chemistry that we can no longer deny the sex the privilege of participating in this science also.” Which may sound patronising to 21st century ears, but it was 1810 after all. Women wouldn’t even be trusted to vote for another century, let alone do tricky science.

I think I’ve found Strumia’s limousine; it’s bright red, very loud, and can only manage short distances.

Speaking of patronising comments, another thing that Strumia said in his interview was, “It is not as if they send limousines to pick up boys wanting to study physics and build walls to keep out the women.”

This is one of those statements that manages, at the same time, to be both true and also utterly absurd. Pupils, undergraduates, post-grads and post-docs do not exist in some sort of magical vacuum until, one day, they are presented with a Grand Choice to continue, or not, with their scientific career. Their decision to stop, if it comes, is influenced by a thousand, often tiny, things. Constant, subtle, nudges which oh-so-gently push them towards, or away, and which start in the earliest years of childhood. You only need to spend five minutes watching the adverts on children’s television to see that girls and boys are expected to have very different interests.

Textbooks may be studied by girls, but they rarely mention the work of female scientists.

So let’s end with another of Professor Resmini’s comments: that the work of past female scientists deserves greater recognition than it has received. This could not be more true, and this lack of representation is exactly one of those nudges I mentioned. Pick up a chemistry textbook and look for the pictures of female scientists: there might be a photo of Marie Curie, if you’re lucky. Kathleen Lonsdale usually gets a mention in the section on benzene in post-GCSE texts. But all too often, that’s about it. On the other hand, pictures of Haber, J. J. Thompson, Rutherford, Avogadro and Mendeleev are common enough that most chemistry students could pick them out of a lineup.

We should ask ourselves about the message this quietly suggests: that women simply haven’t done any “serious” chemistry (this is not the case, of course) and… perhaps never will?

Online, things have begun to shift. Dr Jess Wade has famously spent many, many hours adding the scientific contributions of women to Wikipedia, for example. It’s time things changed in print, too. Perhaps we could begin by starting the rates of reaction chapter in chemistry texts with a mention of Fulhame’s groundbreaking work.

EDIT: After I posted this, I learned that the Breaking Chemical Bias project is currently taking suggestions on the missing women scientists in the chemistry curriculum. I filled in the form for Fulhame, naturally! If this post has made you think of any other good examples, do head on over and submit their names.

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It’s June 8th: please go and vote

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Dear non-British readers: apologies, this may not be very relevant to you. But it’s important, so I’m writing it anyway. I’m sure you will forgive me just this once. I promise normal service will resume once all the fun and games are over.

Right, who’s still with me? Brilliant. Here we go.

Thirteen years ago, the late Sir Terry Pratchett wrote in his novel, Going Postal:

“What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.”

Like much of his writing, it’s hilarious with an aftertaste of tragic. Because, well, you don’t need me to tell you because. But everyone should read Going Postal, and then its sequel, Making Money (published in 2007 and therefore written before the stock markets crashed) if for no other reason than to marvel at Pratchett’s apparent prescience.

Anyway, why am I bringing this up? I’m bringing this up because it’s election day in the U.K. today – June 8th 2017.

Unlike Pratchett’s fictional Ankh Morpork (where there is famously a “one man, one vote” democracy – Lord Vetinari is the man, and he has the vote) in the U.K. everyone has a vote. Well, more or less. Everyone over the age of 18, who’s previously registered to vote and… (etc). Nearly everyone, anyway. Probably everyone reading this.

But weirdly, a lot of people don’t use that privilege. In 2015 just two thirds of people who were eligible to vote actually went and did it. If all, or even most, of those people voted for one particular party, it actually could change the outcome of an election.

Turnout amongst 18-24 year-olds was particularly low. In 2015 it was 43%, whereas turnout for people over 65 was 78% – approaching double.

And this, if you’ll excuse the phrase, is really arse-backwards, isn’t it? Because it’s those younger people who are going to have to live with the consequences of whatever decision is made for the longest amount of time. They absolutely SHOULD have their say.

So, this is my point: please, GO AND VOTE. I don’t care what you have to say, I just want you to have a say.

And finally, in case it’s helpful, here’s a really quick summary of the key scientific and technology-related policies of the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats, which I’ve condensed from this page at wired.co.uk (do go and read the whole thing). The party names at the start of each bulletin point link to their respective manifestos:

  • CONSERVATIVES – more spent on research and development, especially batteries and electric vehicles. New police infrastructure to deal with cybercrime. By 2020 every home and business will have high-speed broadband, with 5G rolling out by 2022. There will be new institutes of technology in every major city in England. The UK’s shale gas industry (i.e. fracking) will be developed and legislation created for plans to extract the gas. Emissions will be reduced by 80% (compared to 1990 levels) by 2050.
  • LABOUR – A “science innovation fund” will be created with a specific aim to protect the environment. Labour will “reintroduce effective judicial oversight” of surveillance powers” (i.e. the IP Act). Plans to roll out “universal superfast broadband” by 2022 and create “uninterrupted” 5G coverage. Fracking will be banned, renewable energy technologies will instead be favoured. Air pollution will be addressed by means of a “Clean Air Act”.
  • LIBERAL DEMOCRATS – Will fight to retain academic grants from the EU and protect science budgets. “Supported investment” for energy storage and other technologies. Surveillance powers to be rolled back. All properties in the UK will have 30 Mbps download speed by 2022 and an upload speed of 6 Mbps, with an unlimited usage cap. New centres for innovation will be created. Diesel cars and small vans will be banned from sale by 2025. Will oppose fracking. Greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced by 80% by 2040, net greenhouse gas emissions to be zero 10 years later.

GO AND VOTE (have I already said that?)

See you on the other side. Here’s a picture of a cat. Cats are nice.

Vaccines are one of humankind’s best achievements, and we should all be shouting about it

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science-fiction-1819026_960_720Imagine aliens finally get around to visiting our planet…

“About two hundred years ago,” explains the alien scientific advisor – let’s call him Spuck – “humans developed a way to prevent disease which they call vaccination. It’s really quite fascinating. They use a needle to place a tiny quantity of a fluid into the muscle under the skin of their arm or leg. The substances are then absorbed into their bodies and cause their highly-evolved immune systems to generate an immune response without, and this is really quite ingenious, Captain, their having to contact the actual diseases or suffer the symptoms. This simple procedure has saved millions of lives worldwide, and saved many millions more from having to suffer less fatal, but none the less still deeply unpleasant, consequences of serious illnesses.”

“Sounds great, Spuck,” says the Captain – let’s call him Birk – “is there a downside?”

“Not really, Captain. Side effects are rare and extremely minor compared to the seriousness of the illnesses themselves.”

“Fantastic. Why are you telling me all this? I’ve got some green-skinned action I’d like to get back to, if you know what I mean.”

“Well, it’s interesting that you should mention unusual skin tones, Captain. A leader has recently come to power who, amongst other things, has expressed concerns about vaccination.”

“Valid concerns?”

“The scientific evidence suggests not, sir.”

“Sounds like an idiot, Spuck.”

“I couldn’t possibly comment, sir.”

“Huh. Sounds like he could definitely be detrimental to the future of their race, and besides, I’m bored. Let’s go and shoot some stuff in direct contravention of the Cardinal Directive. Set blazers to ki- I mean, stun. Beam me down, Dottie!”

***

Vaccination. It’s a hot topic at the moment, and one which is so important that I think anyone who has anything to do with science communication ought to be talking about it. I’m not a medical doctor, or an immunologist, or even a biochemist (for more qualified input on the subject, I refer you here, here and here), but I AM capable of recognising scientific consensus and of separating good-quality evidence-based information from conspiracy theory dross.

Vaccination is awesome.

Awesome is a word that is somewhat overused. But I mean it literally. As in, inspires awe. We should stop, for a moment, and just look at how bloody amazing vaccination is. Thanks to these simple, near-painless, injections – most of which we receive as young children and therefore don’t even remember – we are largely protected from the horrors of….

  • Polio – symptoms and complications include fever, vomiting, headache, back pain, joint pain and stiffness, permanent muscle weakness, permanent paralysis and death.
  • Mumps – symptoms and complications include fever, headache, meningitis, painful testicular swelling in males and ovarian inflammation in females, both of which can  result in permanent infertility, pancreatic inflammation and, occasionally, hearing loss. Death from mumps is rare, but does occur in about 1 in 10,000 cases.
  • Tuberculosis – symptoms and complications include fever, loss of appetite, severe fatigue, chest pain, coughing up of blood, scarring of the lungs, internal bleeding and death (death is considerably more likely if the patient does not have access to medical care).
  • Measles – symptoms and complications include fever, painful skin rash, diarrhoea, vomiting, ear infection which can result in deafness, eye infection which can result in blindness, laryngitis, pneumonia, bronchitis, liver infection, encephalitis, and increased likelihood of re-contracting diseases previously survived (measles essentially “wipes” your immune system). Oh yes, and death. As many as 1% of measles patients will die from the disease.

… and umpteen other, horrible diseases, the majority of which most people reading this will have never experienced. Because of vaccination.

Measles rash

A child with a measles rash. The disease can cause serious complications, including immune suppression.

The risks of vaccination are tiny. The most common complications are redness and swelling around the injection site and/or slight temperature which is easily treated with an antipyretic such as paracetamol or ibuprofen. Very occasionally people suffer a serious allergic reaction, but this inevitably happens quickly after the injection is given. Since vaccinations are usually administered in a medical setting, any allergic reaction that does occur can be quickly managed. There have been a few other genuine cases of serious, adverse reactions to vaccines, but problems are still very rare (the swine flu-narcolepsy link, for example, affected 1 in 55,000) and specific to particular vaccines, and the vaccine in question has been quickly investigated.

Like Birk, if you’ve had nothing to do with the anti-vaccination community, you may be thinking this all sounds good. Benefits massive, risks tiny. Fab. Let’s go.

However, the anti-vaccination crowd – a real, and not entirely new, thing – will tell you that this is all lies. They will tell you this loudly, and at length, and repeatedly. They believe that vaccinations cause every health problem from acne to zygomycosis, but particularly the neurodevelopmental condition known as autism.

Vaccines do not cause autism. At all. As Spuck said, the scientific evidence is clear. It’s absolutely ice-from-a-moutain-stream-in-the-middle-of-nowhere crystal clear. Just for one example, a meta analysis published in the journal Vaccine in 2014 looked at studies involving over a million children. The data revealed no relationship between vaccination and autism. None. Nada.

Vaccines, you see, do not cause autism. And actually, it’s about time we stopped wasting precious resources proving that over and over and over and over again and instead focused on what does cause autism, because that would be a question worth answering.

Infection rates dropped enormously in the US after the measles vaccination was introduced.

Infection rates dropped enormously in the US after the measles vaccination was introduced.

Anti-vaxxers will often repeatedly talk about mercury in vaccines. There’s mercury in vaccines, they’ll say, and that’s nasty stuff, so even if we haven’t proved it yet, they must be causing something bad. One problem there: there isn’t any mercury in vaccines. There’s a preservative called thimerosal (or thiomersal) in some flu vaccines – which are not the ones usually given to children – but thimerosal is no more mercury than salt is chlorine.

The anti-vax crowd get whackier after this. Some of them will tell you that vaccinations don’t, in fact, protect against against disease at all – despite huge evidence to the contrary (see also here), not to mention the simple fact that many of our grandparents and even parents remember these diseases, and their complications, as horribly commonplace.

Anti-vaxxers often state that deaths from these diseases were dropping before the vaccines were introduced. This is true. Deaths did drop, because medical science was developing rapidly. A measles patient receiving medical care is, indeed, less likely to die than one left to her own devices. If I may say so, duh.

What vaccines did is to massively reduce infection rates. But just to state the obvious: if people don’t catch a disease, they also can’t die from it.

In short, if an anti-vaxxer shows you a graph, it’s smart to check to the axes labels.

After that they get really loony, and some of them will even tell you things such as smallpox wasn’t eradicated, it was just renamed acne. Or polio has been reclassified as Guillain-Barré syndrome. These ideas are so utterly ridiculous they don’t even deserve rebuke.

This has started up again in the last few days, particularly in the UK, because of the nasty deposit of conspiracy crap that is the film Vaxxed. It’s available online, but I shall not be linking to it here.

The film claims to reveal a massive cover-up at the Centre for Disease Control (the CDC) in America, and evidence that vaccines are generally evil and cause all manner of heinous negative health outcomes. Very little of it is true, and where a tiny nugget of true fact has been included it’s been so beaten and manipulated as to have lost all of its original meaning. There’s an excellent piece about it on Skeptical Raptor website, which I recommend reading before you google the term “vaxxed”. Consider it a sort of inoculation against the nonsense, if you like (hoho).

A Guardian article from 2010 reports on Wakefield.

A Guardian article from 2010 (click for link).

The main brain behind the film is Mr Andrew Wakefield, a former British doctor who was struck off the General Medical Council in 2010, when the GMC said he had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly.” Wakefield was, it turned out, trying to patent his own measles vaccine. In an effort to further his own aims, he set out to discredit the widely-used MMR (measles, mumps and rubella vaccine) by fabricating results and, in particular, suggesting a link between the MMR and autism. He denied all this, of course, but a libel judge disagreed.

Wakefield is still pushing his message. He is not a particularly nice individual. Listen to him in this video clip, for example, where he responds to Bill Gates comment, made in 2015, that he (Gates) fears a pandemic could wipe out humanity in his lifetime. Actually, I’ll save you the trouble:

“Ho Chi Minh City, you may have seen this, an outbreak of [laughs] the plague in Ho Chi Minh City. The outbreak that they were not prepared for, they never prepared for, and that is the number of children with autism in Ho Chi Minh City has increased by nearly one hundred and sixty times over eight years. So, Bill, just for your edification, the plague that you’re talking about, the next plague, the next epidemic, it’s already here. It’s already here.”

Yes, you heard that right, according to Wakefield autism is a “plague”. Anyone reading this with an autism diagnosis? You have the plague. Nice, huh?

Andrew Wakefield describes autism as a "plague".

Andrew Wakefield describes autism as a “plague”.

For the record, the number of autism diagnoses in Ho Chi Minh has increased sharply over recent years, but this is may well be – as often turns out to be the case – largely due to to better diagnosis. Certainly there’s absolutely no suggestion that it’s linked to the introduction of a vaccine or vaccines. There might be an environmental factor – some sort of pollutant perhaps – but no one is certain at the moment. (To repeat myself: perhaps if we stopped wasting time endlessly disproving the link between vaccines and autism, we’d have a better idea.)

By the way, the woman in that video clip is Polly Tommey. She has an autistic son who’s now in his twenties. Back in 2010 she chose to try and raise awareness of autism by posing in a Wonderbra-style advert, and these days she follows the campaign trail with Wakefield, repeating the message that they “will win”. What exactly they’re going to win isn’t entirely clear. Would preventing vaccination, at the cost of many lives, really be a win?

Vaxxed was due to be shown at the Curzon cinema in Soho, London on Valentine’s Day. It was pulled after the cinema realised what the film was – they had merely leased their premises to private individuals and only realised what was going on when a number of science advocates started complaining.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Curzon Cinemas said:

“We do not wish to profit from a film that has demonstrably caused great distress.”

The heyevent.uk page on Vaxxed, explaining that the location will be "annnounced" two hours before the screening.

The heyevent.uk page on Vaxxed explains that the location will be “annnounced” two hours before the screening.

Tommey was predictably unimpressed by this outcome, which she blamed on “our little five trolls in England,” saying “Britain being who they are, being big wussy pussies, just strike it off.”

Unfortunately, the cancellation turned out to be less of a victory than it first appeared. The anti-vaxx crowd then set out to find a new venue. And this time, they kept it quiet. There are many, many places that will rent you a space to screen a film, and I’ll wager that few of them really check the nature of that film. So, the anti-vaxxers correctly reasoned, if we don’t tell people where it is, no one will be able to stop us. People who had previously bought tickets were told it would be in “Central London”, and that the venue would be revealed two hours before the show.

And so, it happened. At Regent’s University London, a private university which was, incidentally, recently identified as the most expensive place to study in the UK.

In hindsight, this might actually have been worse than a screening at an independent cinema. Dodgy film in a cinema – so what? “Official” screening at a university with Q&A sessions afterwards? Hm, sounds important and… academic. The press, naturally, made the most of it, with headlines such as “Disgraced anti‑MMR vaccine doctor Andrew Wakefield gets invitation to university in London.” Sure, the first line of the actual article says the university has been criticised, but who actually reads beyond the headlines these days? Sounds like he’s being taken seriously, doesn’t it?

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Regent’s University’s response on Twitter on February 15th

Regent’s University responded pretty quickly to say that they hadn’t known what the film was, that they didn’t endorse its views, and that they would be revetting all their clients.

This provoked lots of complaints about freedom of speech, because many people seem to be under the misapprehension that freedom of speech means that any and all organisations and venues have a duty to allow them to repeat their nonsense. This is not what freedom of speech means. Freedom of speech means you can’t be chucked in prison for saying a thing (with some exceptions). It does NOT mean that everyone has to listen to you, or that you can say your thing wherever and whenever you like, whether the place renting you the space likes it or not.

More alarming still was the Q&A session at the end of the screening of Vaxxed. I watched some of it (one for the team, you’re welcome). There was much talk of “getting the message out there”, “sowing the seeds”, “people have to hear the message x times before they’ll start to accept it” and so on. In short, if you didn’t know it was all about vaccines it would start to sound an awful lot like…. well, at best a religion, and at worst a cult.

Wakefield was also asked if he would ever get his name cleared. This was his response:

Wakefield speaking at the end of the Vaxxed screening.

Wakefield speaking at the end of the Vaxxed screening.

“Well, cleared by whom? Here’s a… it’s a really important… cleared by whom? Do I want to be part of the medical profession again? [muttering from the audience] Do I want to be exonerated by the General Medical Council? Do I want to pay them an annual retainer fee? To be part of… Do I really? Is that… that takes time and effort. What is more important? Making films like this? Or trying to clear my name? [applause]“

Hang on. If he really cared about getting the science right, about doing the right thing by patients, wouldn’t getting his name cleared and being reinstated as a medical doctor be of utmost importance? If he’s right about vaccines, particularly the MMR vaccine, and if he truly wants to prove it for the good of humanity, what better way than to be exonerated?

But as he says, “that takes time and effort.” What he doesn’t add, of course, is that making films like Vaxxed, travelling around the world spreading his message and hobnobbing with Donald Trump, almost certainly makes him a lot more money than being a doctor ever did. And I’ll bet it’s more fun. Why would he go back to the long hours and hard work that being a regular old doctor entails?

Wakefield is playing an extremely unpleasant and disingenuous game. The really worrying thing is that he and other anti-vaccination campaigners might be gaining ground. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Robert De Niro recently announced a $100,000 “challenge” to prove the safety of thimerosal vaccines. Thimerosal has already been extensively investigated – no evidence has ever been found that its inclusion in vaccines causes neurological effects, but anyway, it’s only in a few flu vaccines. Of course, the implication is that all vaccines are unsafe and that no one can prove otherwise – and now those headlines are out there, and that seed has been planted, will people really read further into it? Or will they just decide to skip the visit to the doctor?

The consequences of that are potentially serious. A mumps outbreak was reported in Washington State a week ago, and cases of mumps and measles have also just been reported in Salt Lake County. Last autumn the Guardian reported that the proportion of under-twos receiving their first dose of the MMR vaccine had fallen for the third consecutive year, and there were several reports of measles outbreaks in the UK. Flu outbreaks are also a real concern: years of hearing the phrase “mild flu-like symptoms” have created the misconception that influenza itself is a mild disease. It is not. There have been over 100 deaths from flu in Germany this year alone. People in Germany have access to good healthcare. People are still dying.

Outbreaks put everyone at risk: vaccination is effective, but nothing is 100% effective. In the midst of a full outbreak, even the vaccinated are at risk of catching the disease, and of course, those who are too young to receive the vaccine, or who can’t have it because of a genuine allergy, or because they’re immunocompromised, will be in real trouble. Let’s not forget: measles in particular is a disease with a host of horrible complications, not to mention the potential to reduce a person’s previously acquired immunity to other diseases.

Do we really want to see measles and mumps come back? Really? Because that will ultimately be the result of all of this.

And unfortunately, Captain Birk and Mr Spuck aren’t actually there to fix this mess for us. We need to see sense ourselves.

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Homeopathy: a drop in the ocean?

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HomeopathicCartoonAs a skeptical chemist I have, until now, avoided the topic of homeopathy.  It felt a bit obvious, rather like shooting fish in a barrel.  Hasn’t everyone and his sister written an article about it at some point?  There’s the brilliant 10:23 campaign on the subject, and the comedians Mitchell and Webb even wrote a fabulously funny sketch on the topic (do watch it if you haven’t, I particularly love the idea of homeopathic lager).  How much more mainstream can you get?  Surely everyone knows it’s a load of old nonsense by now?

And yet, and yet… I still meet people that don’t know what it is, or who are a bit confused about it.  Many don’t know the difference between herbal remedies and homeopathy.  Many think they know someone who’s used it and it’s worked, or have used it themselves and felt that it helped them.

Worse, the NHS, despite admitting outright that, “homeopathic remedies perform no better than placebos, and that the principles on which homeopathy is based are ‘scientifically implausible” still spends money on it, going on to say on the very same web page that “there are several NHS homeopathic hospitals and some GP practices also offer homeopathic treatment.”  There are widely divergent figures on exactly how much the NHS spends on this treatment which they fully admit does not work, but there’s general agreement that it’s in the millions.  A fullfact.org article written in 2010 concluded that it was £12 million from 2005-8, which didn’t include the £20 million spent refurbishing the Royal London homeopathic hospital from 2002 to 2005.  More recently a Daily Mail article (yes, yes, I know) claimed it was £4 million a year.

In a way, does it matter?  It may be a tiny proportion of the NHS’s total £108.9 billion budget, but it’s still millions of pounds of public money.  For something that doesn’t work.

Ok, but what is it?  Well firstly let’s briefly talk about ‘mainstream’ medicine.  Also called conventional medicine, allopathic medicine, orthodox medicine or Western medicine, it’s the system by which trained professionals (doctors, nurses, pharmacists etc) treat diseases and their symptoms using tested drugs.  And make no mistake, mainstream drugs are tested.  Different countries have different regulations, but in the UK clinical trials involve at least three phases and take ten to fifteen years or even more.

Homeopathic treatments don’t have to go through this testing.  And unlike conventional doctors, who have to complete five years of study followed by further years of foundation training and yet more studying, there is no regulation of homeopathic practitioners in the UK.  Now, that ought to give anyone pause for thought.

Secondly, all drugs that actually work have side effects; effects that are secondary to the intended ones.  All of them.  There’s no avoiding it; there’s ‘no effect without side effects’.  You may not experience them personally, but someone somewhere almost certainly will.  Much of medicine is about balancing side effects against positive effects, and a lot of the time it comes down to how severe and life-threatening the disease being treated is.  If you have a bit of a cold, you’re probably happy to take some paracetamol which, when taken at the proper dose, has ‘as rash’ listed as its only side-effect.

But since the odds are very good that you’re going to recover from your cold whether you treat it or not you wouldn’t, on the other hand, want to take something that might have serious side effects like the anti-viral Tamiflu (headaches, nausea, cough, vomiting, sleeping problems, indigestion, pain, tiredness, vertigo… and that’s just some of them).  However, if you genuinely have flu (real flu, not “I’ve got a nasty cold but I’m calling it flu so that I sound like less of a skiver”) then Tamiflu might be appropriate, because real flu can be genuinely life-threatening.

HomeopathyWhy is this relevant to a discussion about homeopathy?  Because homeopathic treatments don’t have side-effects (at least, not any directly related to the pills and potions themselves).  Homeopaths are generally quite keen to tell you this.  But it means that the treatments are ineffective. There’s no getting around this I’m afraid.  You can’t have your cake and eat it, even if you dilute it by a factor of 1060.

Speaking of dilutions…  Now, I’m not about to go into a huge amount of detail about the history and reasoning behind homeopathy because, firstly, other people have already done an excellent job of that, secondly I always worry that it starts to sound alarmingly plausible if you’re not very careful and thirdly, a summary ought to be much more potent than a full description (this little witticism will make sense in a minute).

Certain substances, poisons generally, cause nasty symptoms.  Homeopaths believe that if you take very, very tiny amounts of those substances they’ll do the opposite and cure those symptoms when they’ve been caused by an illness.  For example, arsenic causes headaches, nausea and diarrhoea.  So logically (for a given value of ‘logic’) at homeopathic doses it’s used to treat digestive disorders and food poisoning.  These tiny amounts are achieved by successive dilutions: you add one drop of a substance to ninety-nine drops of water, and then you take one drop of that mixture and add it to ninety-nine more drops of water, and then you take one drop of that and….

…You keep going until you’ve done it at least six times.  Remember each dilution is a factor of one hundred.  The first time it’s done you get a solution of 0.01%.  By the time the procedure’s been followed six times, it’s 0.000 000 000 1%.  This is called 6C.  Homeopaths believe that more dilute solutions are more potent, that is they’ll be even better at treating the illness than something more concentrated.

0004908_nelsons-bryonia-30c-homeopathic-remedy_300In fact, quite a lot of remedies are sold as 30C.  That’s 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 1%

Let’s attempt to put that in context.  Every year Cambridge University’s Chemistry department holds the Cambridge Chemistry Challenge (try saying that six times fast) and in 2012 there were some rather lovely questions involving homeopathy in the paper.  Here are a few choice morsels:

One question asked entrants to calculate the mass of arsenic oxide in 100 ml (a small amount, but still about four times greater than the volumes that are usually sold) of a 30C homeopathic remedy.  The answer was 2.06 x 10-30 grams.  That’s a thousand times less than the mass of a single proton.  A drop in the ocean isn’t the half of it.  Not only is there not even one molecule of the original substance in there, the dilutions have wiped out even the possibility of a sub-atomic particle.

6a00d83451df0c69e200e54f9413f98833-800wiThen they were asked to work out the amount of the remedy someone would need to take to experience a fatal dose, and express the answer as a fraction of the volume of the Earth.  The answer?  4500 times the volume of the Earth.  Probably no need for those “in case of accidental overdose contact a healthcare practitioner” warnings, then.

Finally, how many bottles of the solution would you need to buy to stand a chance of obtaining one atom of arsenic?  The answer: 285 million bottles.

So let’s be clear, homeopathic remedies have no active ingredient.  Nil.  Nothing,  Nada.

“Ah,” say the homeopaths, “we accept that.  That’s not the point.  The water ‘remembers’ the original chemical; the water molecules retain a ‘memory’ of that substance and it’s that memory that has the effect”.

At this point people who actually know some science start tearing their hair out (by the way, apparently fluoric acid, i.e. HF, is a recommended homeopathic treatment for hair loss – good job it is diluted else it might eat through the glass bottle).

Just think about it for a few seconds.  If it were true that water retains a memory of the substances that have been dissolved in it, and that memory was so powerful that it could have a real, physiological, effect on the body, then we would be constantly bombarded with ‘treatments’ every single time we drank a glass of water.  You know that water that comes out of your tap?  Well, sorry to be blunt about this, but it went through a few other people before it got to your tap, picking up all sorts of substances on the way.  Your local water company purified it, and in the process almost certainly added coagulants to precipitate out impurities.  These are then removed of course (that’s the point) but if what the homeopaths suggest is right (which it’s not) your water would ‘remember’ them.  Lead pipes would be the least of your worries.

From here the theories get increasingly outlandish.  Next stop, ‘transference’.  This is the idea that remedies can affect living organisms from a distance.  Yup.  Basically a practitioner can call someone on the phone and proceed to diagnose, and treat, them from miles away, without them having to actually swallow a thing.  Oh yes, and also water placed next to a homeopathic remedy (which is also just water, in case I need to say it again) can take on characteristics of the remedy.

Photo 13-06-2013 09 06 54 PMNow, if this were true the world simply wouldn’t work the way we know it does.  You’d be exposed every time you walked past the Alternative Remedy section in a shop.  Humans have really quite a lot of water in them; if anything like this actually happened, you could ‘catch’ antibiotics from your friend who happened to be taking them, just by standing too close.  You wouldn’t need to clean your toilet, just leave the bleach bottle next to it and it ought to work by transference (many students have tried this, it really doesn’t work).

The homeopaths will cry that I’m wilfully misunderstanding their methods, because I’ve forgotten to mention ‘potentization’.  Oh yes, allow me to explain: when you prepare a homeopathic remedy you have to shake or tap the preparation at each stage – sometimes with a particular object (a magic wand, perhaps) – otherwise it doesn’t work.  It’s not just the dilution, it’s the special tapping that does the trick, because it somehow allows the water molecules to remember the energy signature of the molecules of ‘active’ ingredient.

Next time someone claims homeopathy works, ask them if they believe in magic.  There really is very little difference.

At this point though homeopaths resort to a few final bits of misdirection and sleight of hand.  They claim that everyone who casts doubt over homeopathy is in the thrall of ‘Big Pharma‘.  They say that the big pharmaceutical companies – whom they imply control the world, possibly from a giant hollowed-out volcano somewhere – deliberately discredit homeopathy because they have a lot to lose if people use it instead of conventional (they tend to use the term ‘allopathic’) medicine.

This neatly sidesteps the fact that homeopaths have an awful lot to lose if people stop buying their pills and potions, and especially in the UK if the NHS stop funding it.  In fact, I suspect they have a lot more to lose since pharmaceutical companies, for all their faults, are required by law to prove that their drugs actually do something.

And finally homeopaths will tell you that allopathic medicines have killed millions of people, whereas homeopathy has never killed anyone.  Hm.  It’s true that people die from negative drug reactions.  It’s also true that sick people sometimes die.  Occasionally it’s difficult to say whether a person would have died sooner with or without drug intervention.  But for most people conventional drugs are far more likely to keep them safe and well than kill them.

sopHomeopathy on the other hand… well it’s true the remedies themselves won’t kill you.  A little bit of sugar and water never killed anyone.  But, sadly, there are people who don’t seek conventional treatment because they believe what a homeopath tells them.  Sometimes those people leave it too late, and sometimes they die when their life might have been saved.  Even worse, sometimes those people are parents, and they end up making bad decisions about their child’s treatment.  If you doubt me, there’s a whole list of tragic stories on the whatstheharm website.

Sometimes homeopathy does appear to work, but that’s been shown time and time again to be a placebo effect.  Now, I think that the placebo effect is cool.  I mean, it’s really awesome.  Basically, if you believe you’ll feel better, you do – at least sometimes.  People have even debated whether this can work in animals (probably not, although owners and vets might think it’s working).  Personally, I think lots of research should be going on in the area of placebo, because it’s utterly fascinating.  But.  Here’s the thing: I used the words “feel better” back there very deliberately.  The placebo effect is great for things that have a level of subjectivity, such as pain management.  When people carry out objective measures, such as lung function for an asthmatic for example, there’s usually little improvement.  The placebo effect is highly unlikely to effectively treat diseases such as asthma, or diabetes, or cancer.

And that means homeopathy cannot treat those things either.  And people absolutely shouldn’t be allowed to tell ill, vulnerable people that it can.

I know there are some people who don’t trust the government, and who think it’s all run by nine foot tall lizards, but regardless I’m going to return to the Science and Technology Committee’s report:

Screen Shot 2013-06-13 at 22.53.02“the evidence base shows that homeopathy is not efficacious (that is, it does not work beyond the placebo effect) and that explanations for why homeopathy would work are scientifically implausible.”

and…

“The product labelling for homeopathic products under all current licensing schemes fails to inform the public that homeopathic products are sugar pills containing no active ingredients.”

Finally, ask yourself this: at a time when disabled people are facing cuts to their much-needed benefits, with many tragic stories of people being designated ‘fit for work’ when they really aren’t, is it right that millions of pounds are available for a ‘treatment’ which, at the risk of sounding like a stuck record, does not work?

And for the record, I have absolutely no affiliation whatsoever with any pharmaceutical company.  I am, however, more than happy to admit supporting campaigns such as 10:23, because there really is ‘nothing in it’.

—-

Late addendum: I have just been reminded (thank you @Sci_McInnes) that of course our Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt (the one made famous by James Naughtie’s delightful slip of the tongue) is a supporter of homeopathy.  Yes, the person that is effectively in charge of the NHS believes that tapping water in a special way turns it into an effective medicine, despite the evidence of the Science and Technology Committee.  If you weren’t cross about it before, you really, really should be now.

Toys for the boys. Or not

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_38720335_girlwithlego300When I was a kid I was a bit of a tomboy.  ‘Bit’ being the understatement of the century.  I had short hair, lived in trousers and had a memorable (for me anyway, I’m sure they’ve long forgotten it) argument with my parents about getting a model Castle Grayskull.  I lost the argument, but more because it was a frightful waste of money than for any other reason.  I also remember owning a small mountain of Lego, several Sindy dolls (ok, they were a bit girly), a large collection of Garbage Pail Kids cards, an Etch a Sketch, numerous Rubik’s puzzles, a microscope, an electronics kit, and a chemistry set.

I don’t recall ever being under the impression that any of those last three were ‘for boys’.  Actually I don’t recall categorising many toys as for boys or girls.  Ok, yes, the Sindy dolls were girly, but then boys had Action Man, so that balanced out.  Everything else was fair game, wasn’t it?  I don’t remember the toy section in most shops being split into boys and girls.  I certainly don’t remember any areas that were awash with horrific sickly pink, and I swear the only place I ever heard hide or hair of a princess was in a Grimms’ fairy tale.

It seems to be different now, and I’m at a loss to understand why.  You would think that 30-odd years later, in the 21st century, there would be less gender discrimination, not more.

Perhaps it’s down to the fact that every bit of stock is entered into a database now, and those databases have somehow managed to have ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ fields built into them, and so someone allocates toys to these categories, probably without a great deal of thought.  Shops claim these categories make things ‘easier’ for shoppers, and perhaps it does, at least for online shoppers looking for inspiration for a present and not really knowing where to start.  Boy or girl is one question most people can probably answer.

But if so, it’s rather depressing that the result of modern technology is to perpetuate the idea that science isn’t for girls.  Because this is what seems to have happened.  Recently there have been a number of high profile cases of big-name stores allocating science toys as ‘for boys’.

M and S toysThe first one I came across was Marks and Spencer: a photo doing the rounds on Facebook last Christmas, courtesy of the Let Toys Be Toys (LTBT) campaign, with the witty tagline “this is not just sexism, this is Marks & Spencer sexism” showing all the science toys labelled as “boys’ stuff”.  Marks & Spencer, to their credit, responded quickly and changed their online catalogue.  A quick look now suggests they’ve more or less stuck to this ideal, although they do still have a handful of branded toys labelled as ‘boys stuff’.  We have yet to see what will happen next Christmas.

I had been unaware of it before then, but it turns out that the London toy shop Hamleys had removed their blue “boys” and pink “girls” signs in the face of similar criticism some time previously.

boots boys and girlsSkip forward a bit, and we come to Boots.  Now this is particularly ironic, since Boots is (in case you hadn’t noticed) a pharmaceutical company.  It was established in 1849 by John Boot, who used to help his mother – yes, a woman – run the family’s herbal medicine shop in Nottingham.  You might think that such a company would be particularly keen to encourage women into the sciences, and especially chemistry.  You know, given that chemistry is a required A-level for studying pharmacy at university.  Say, at Nottingham University, down the road (where, incidentally, I completed my chemistry PhD).  And yet, here we go again, all the science toys were labelled as being for boys while girls were doomed to pink princess tea sets.  Ooops.  There was activity on Twitter.  The BBC television show Watchdog picked up the story.   Customers started complaining.  Boots issued a statement saying that they were terribly sorry that their efforts to ‘help’ shoppers (see what I mean?) had gone astray, and that they were removing the signage immediately.

Tesco clangerSuddenly the whole thing was picking up some serious momentum.  You might think that the bigger stores at least would have taken a hasty look at their shelves and made some quick changes.  Perhaps some did, but Tesco’s were a bit slow to catch on.  Sarah Marr wrote a great open letter to Tesco on her blog, in which she pointed out that she had frivolously wasted time in gaining a PhD in theoretical physics when she should perhaps, if Tesco had their way, have spent a bit more time in the kitchen.

Initially Tesco were pretty unrepentant, claiming that toy signage reflected the way customers liked to shop (there we go again – I really would like to see the consumer research that all these retailers seem to be referring to).  Then Watchdog picked it up, following on from last week’s Boots story, and suddenly they backed down completely and said it had all been a mistake.  Funny how being broadcast to a few million viewers on BBC at 8pm can make a company change their minds isn’t it?

Personally I find this one particularly galling, since I am a chemist myself, and definitely lacking a Y chromosome.  The idea that chemistry is only for boys is ridiculous.  And anyway, there’s a lot of chemistry in cooking.  Just ask Heston Blumenthal.

In fact, I wonder if he had a toy cookery set when he was a kid?  Someone should ask him.  Perhaps he could be persuaded to launch a ‘chemistry of cooking’ set, that would really confuse everyone wouldn’t it?

Girls should, of course, be free to play with whatever toy they like, from cupcake set to chemistry set.  Boys ought be able to choose a toy drill or a toy doll, or both.  There is no need to label these things as ‘for boys’ or ‘for girls’, let children, and their parents, choose whichever toy they want.

The real problem with these signs is that they subtly send the message that children shouldn’t be playing with certain toys, and that’s just wrong.  The result of this effort to make things ‘easier’ for shoppers may actually be that they end up never looking at the science toys when they’re buying presents for their daughter, granddaughter or niece.  Or they might, but then worry that a present won’t be well-received because it’s a ‘boys’ toy.

Girls might simply never see those toys – after all why would they look at something that’s apparently not for them – and never develop any curiosity.  And we all know how susceptible children can be to peer pressure.  A girl playing with a ‘boys’ toy might be teased by her friends.  What if that insidious little idea sticks?  When she’s choosing her A-levels some years later, might she think “chemistry’s for boys” and not choose it, despite being more than able?  How many potential scientists might we lose out on as a result?  And make no mistake, we need good chemists.  They will be at the forefront of sorting out the world’s environmental problems, coming up with new fuel strategies, designing new material solutions and working in medicine and pharmaceuticals.

Besides which, chemistry generally has much better career prospects than princess-try.

FInd out more about the Let Toys be Toys campaign here.