I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That (33 page)
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Authors: Ben Goldacre
Promoted, endorsed, trained and buoyed, Barbara Nash has every good reason to think that what she is doing is sensible and correct. Dawn Page – for all that you might think, in an unkind moment, that she was a little gullible – similarly had every reason to believe that Nash was competent. Their view on Nash’s competence, and everyone else’s, is quite reasonably reinforced by the College of Natural Nutrition, the British Association of Nutritional Therapists, Central TV, and every single journalist, editor, commissioner and producer who has shepherded the bizarre world of made-up nutritional nonsense into our lives.
The specific harm done in this one episode is tragic. It always is. The real measure of professionalism is how you investigate, and what you change. No system would be perfect, but in this case, everyone is queuing up to hold out Barbara Nash as solely responsible. When you miss the real cause, you can be sure that the problem will rise again.
Guardian
, 14 November 2009
It’s always interesting when people take pseudoscience out of its natural habitat – Islington – and off into a place where the stakes are quite high. Like the polio vaccine scare in Nigeria. Or Aids denialism in South Africa. Or detecting bombs in Iraq, where the
New York Times
and magician James Randi have uncovered some nonsense of epic proportions.
A British company called ATSC is selling a device that can detect guns, ammunition, bombs, drugs, contraband ivory, and truffles. The bomb-detection equipment that you see in airports weighs several tons, and can only operate over tiny distances.
The ADE 651
uses ‘electrostatic magnetic ion attraction’ and can detect these things from a kilometre away, through walls, under the ground, underwater, or even from an aeroplane five kilometres overhead.
ATSC’s device is pocket-sized and portable. You simply take a piece of plastic-coated cardboard, which has been through ‘the proprietary process of electrostatic matching of the ionic charge and structure of the substance’ you’re trying to find, pop it into a holder connected to a wand, and start detecting. It’s a bit Fisher Price. There are no batteries and no power source: you hold the device to ‘charge’ it with the energy of your body, and become perfectly relaxed, with a steady pulse and blood pressure. Then you walk with the wand at right angles to your body. If there is a bomb on your left, the wand will drift to the left, and point at it. Like a dowsing rod.
Similar devices have been tested repeatedly and shown to perform no better than chance. No police force or security service anywhere in the developed world uses them. But in 2008 the Iraqi government’s Ministry of the Interior bought eight hundred of these devices – the ADE 651 – for $32 million. That’s $40,000 each, and they’ve ordered a further shipment at $53 million. These devices are now being used at hundreds of checkpoints in Iraq, to look for bombs.
Dale Murray, head of the National Explosive Engineering Sciences Security Center at
Sandia Labs
, which does testing for the US Department of Defense, has
tested various similar devices
, and they perform at the level of chance. On Tuesday, two people working for the
New York Times
went through nine Iraqi police checkpoints which were using the device, and none found the rifles and ammunition they were carrying (with licences).
Major General Jehad al-Jabiri is head of the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives. ‘I don’t care about Sandia or the Department of Justice or any of them,’ he says. ‘Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs.’
How would you know? There are no independent tests of the ADE 651 that I can find. The simplest explanation is that nobody could really be bothered. Magician James Randi can. He has carried a cheque for $1 million in his jacket pocket for many years, in an admirably expensive act of passive aggression, and he will give this cheque to anyone who can provide proof of supernatural phenomena. Last year he
invited the manufacturers
of the ADE 651 to come forward, and see if their device works better than chance. They have not.
If you’ve trousered $85 million, you probably don’t care about the Amazing Randi and his puny cheque. We all have our excuses. General al-Jabiri, meanwhile, challenged an
NYT
reporter to test the ADE 651, placing a grenade and a machine pistol in plain view in his office. Every time a policeman used it, the wand pointed at the explosives. Every time the reporter used the device, it failed to detect anything. ‘You need more training,’ said the General.
As of June 2014 James McCormick – the man behind the company selling this device – has been convicted of fraud and sentenced to ten years, al-Jabiri is in jail for taking bribes from McCormick, and the device is being used in Iraq, Pakistan, Kenya and Lebanon.
After Madeleine
, Why Not Bin Laden?
Guardian
, 13 October 2007
Danie Krügel is an ex-policeman in South Africa who believes he can pinpoint the location of missing people anywhere on the map. He does this by using his special magic box, which works through something to do with ‘quantum physics’, but you aren’t allowed to know any more than that: these are ‘complex and secret science techniques’, driven by a ‘secret energy source’ driving a
‘matter orientation system machine’
. By simply popping a strand of the missing person’s hair – or some other source of DNA – into his box of tricks, Krügel can pinpoint that person’s location, anywhere.
This might sound ridiculous to you – or rather, it might sound like the familiar nonsense from psychics, who often involve themselves in cases of missing children – but this week both the
Telegraph
and the
Observer
, as well as several tabloids, featured Krügel in serious news stories on the hunt for Madeleine McCann.
‘Traces of Madeleine McCann’s body were found on a Portuguese beach weeks after she was reported missing,’
said the
Observer
, under the headline ‘Forensic DNA Tests “Reveal Traces of Madeleine’s Body on Resort Beach”’. The
Telegraph
emphasised the science: ‘it emerged the couple had used a scientist to help look for the missing four-year-old using a DNA-tracking device’.
So what do we make of this box, using a new top-secret quantum theory about ‘matter orientation’, invented and manufactured by a retired police officer currently working as head of health and safety at a university? (Or as one newspaper had it: ‘Krügel, of the University of Bloemfontein’.)
This device would have to analyse the DNA at a very high level of resolution, and not just identify DNA, but also the DNA specific to one person, from a distance. It would then use some kind of technology to locate more of that DNA, using a map.
The military applications alone would be incredible. We could use it to find Osama bin Laden, every house burglar in Britain, and Lord Lucan. It would win a Nobel Prize, and the
million-dollar prize
offered by magician James Randi for anyone who can demonstrate paranormal powers. Why not use the device to locate Randi, and then claim his million?
I rang Krügel to ask him. Are his powers paranormal? He says no. He made a discovery while experimenting with some off-the-shelf electronic devices. I asked if I could see the device: sadly, the answer is no. I asked him what he measured, how he knew he was measuring anything, but he wouldn’t say. I asked about the theory, but that’s secret. I asked if he had a background in electronics or quantum theory, and he passed. I asked, ‘What’s a capacitor?’ He was offended. I apologised.
Meanwhile, here is Krügel in a
South African documentary
on his work finding missing children. ‘If you get a signature sample of something … let’s call it organic or non-organic … a very small sample. I have developed a method to use that small sample and to create data that I use to search for its origin. So you transmit and you receive.’
‘Is there anything metaphysical involved? Are you psychic?’
Krügel: ‘I’m a Christian and I put it clearly … this is science, science, science!’
Now put yourself, briefly, in the shoes of someone who has
lost a child
, watching the television through tearful eyes, hoping against hope that your little baby is still alive, not dead, not murdered, not tortured, hoping they will one day be found.
Krügel is gushing: ‘Now that’s fantastic. To phone the dad and say, “Look, I’ve got him,” or “I have got her. You can come and get him,” or “You can come and get her.” ’ ‘How many of those have you had?’ asks the interviewer. ‘A lot, a lot, a lot.’
Who’s Holding
the Smoking Gun on Bioresonance?
Guardian
, 12 November 2005
Just as swearing is best when old, posh people do it, so bad science is best when it’s on BBC News. The
video is online
, but I’ll transcribe. This is a story, delivered with all the authority of television news, about the ‘bioresonance’ treatment to help people give up smoking. ‘The bioresonance treatment is analysing the energy-wave patterns in Jean’s body,’ it begins. ‘It finds the frequency pattern of the nicotine and reverses it. That in theory neutralises the nicotine’s energy pattern, so her body won’t crave what’s been wiped out.’
Reader John Agapiou, who sent this in, wonders what would happen if this device really did work: ‘You’d need to extract the nicotine signal very carefully,’ he says. ‘You wouldn’t want to have any traces of “dopamine” or “haemoglobin” in the recording, and nullify those molecules. Or you’d be in real trouble.’
I’m not sure anyone has ever calculated how many different kinds of molecule there are in the human body, but it must be over a million. So this machine, which looks like a piece of modern hospital equipment, records something through funny little pads attached to the skin, and it can filter out precisely the molecule it’s looking for. This is extraordinary signal processing.
The BBC goes on: ‘That principle has been used to treat illnesses and allergies. Trying to help smokers quit is a new development. There’s still no clinical proof that this works, but the clinic says it treats hundred of smokers every week. And of all those who left their cigarettes here over just the last few days, 70 per cent of them will never go back to smoking.’
This is a better success rate for smoking cessation than any other intervention that has ever been studied, including medication, hypnosis, gum, patches and group interventions.
But of course, BBC policy requires balance: there must be someone in the story to question these outlandish claims. This comes in the form of Simon Martin, from
Complementary and Alternative Therapy
magazine. ‘If you get a really good machine, with a well-educated, good, ethical practitioner, the sky is the limit really, but there’s an awful lot of people out there I think, not very well trained, using inferior equipment, and the sort of results they’re getting really shouldn’t be trusted.’ This is a news story, repeated several times, on BBC television.
Guardian
, 26 September 2009
This week, listening to the Guardian Science podcast, I had a treat. Caspar Melville, editor of
New Humanist
magazine, leader of something called the Rationalist Association, had been to see two films at the Cambridge Film Festival. One was a dreary creationist movie that famously misrepresented the biologists interviewed for it. This was obvious bad science, he explained. But the other was different:
House of Numbers
, a new film about Aids, really had something in it. I have now seen this film. It presents itself as a naïve journey by one young film-maker to discover the science behind HIV. In reality it’s a pernicious piece of Aids denialist propaganda.
All the usual ideas are there. Aids isn’t caused by the HIV virus: it’s caused by antiretroviral drugs themselves. Or poverty. Or drug use. Diagnostic tools don’t work, and Aids is just a spurious basket diagnosis invented to sell antiretroviral medication for a wide range of unrelated problems. The drugs don’t work. You’re better off without them.
It would take a book to address all this, and that blizzard of claims, perhaps, is the point of the film, with all the rhetorical devices that have been honed by Aids denialists and creationists over decades. It repeatedly overstates marginal internal disagreements about the details of HIV research, for example, to the extent that eighteen doctors and scientists who were interviewed in it have issued a statement saying that the director was ‘deceptive’ in his interactions with them, that it perpetuates pseudoscience and myths, and that they were selectively quoted to make it seem as if they are in disagreement and disarray, when in fact they agree on all the important facts.
At one point there is an extended sequence explaining that you can’t take a picture of the HIV virus; or maybe you can, but if you can, different scientists disagree on how, and on whether their method is best. This is an infantile world view, where stuff only exists if you can easily photograph it; where the internet, compound interest and magnetism don’t exist either.
There is a memorable skit on diagnostic tests, where the film-maker manages to find one woman working in a marquee in a shopping centre in Africa giving HIV tests, who accidentally misinforms him about why she is asking for information on his health-risk behaviours. In the film, this one slip by a junior member of staff in a shopping centre becomes a dramatic exposé: the HIV diagnosis is a tautology, it argues, a basket diagnosis for sick people of any kind who engage in risk behaviours; the blood test is unreliable, a piece of theatre; and the diagnosis is only made because the tester has asked if you are gay or inject drugs.
