On Rats (Sciencey Ones)

Most of us know someone who is into one of the popular conspiracy theories or “alt” phenomena of the day, such as antivaxxers, COVID denial, climate change denial, 5G will turn you into a zombie, stuff like that; or perhaps, more mildly, they’ve talked about one of the scientific or medical scare stories that pop up in the media on a regular basis.

Just a few thoughts about the uncritical thinking or lack of awareness of how science works that causes a lot of these ideas to get traction. Often the origin will be a scientific paper, or just a media report about one, that seems to say something radical, against the grain or downright scary. It’s science, right? There must be something in it.

Well… maybe. Let’s delve into why this is almost never the full story. How about, to pluck an example, the notion that your mobile phone can give you cancer. Say there’s a lab study in which they’ve got a bunch of rats living in a cage, and then after a while they put half a dozen iPhones in the cage and turn them on. Flash forward for a period of time and lo and behold, a goodly percentage of the rats have tumors! That proves something, right? Only two things changed: (1) they put iPhones in the cage and (2) now a lot of the rats have tumors. Ergo, the phones must have caused the tumors and the ghost of Steve Jobs is trying to kill you.

Except not necessarily. Just off the top of my head, there are a few more things about the rats and their environment that might be a factor in their tumor-accumulating. They were probably all fed the same food, for example. They all aged. (Oh, you say, but the study only lasted a few months. Well, fine, but that’s a significant chunk of time to a tiny animal.) And there’s the fact that lab rats are more susceptible to tumors to begin with, due to selective breeding over hundreds of generations for precisely that purpose.

Also, you might think about asking the people who ran the study if they had another group of rats who didn’t hang out with a bunch of phones for months, and what happened to them.

And that’s just a few things that occur to my undisciplined mind. There are most likely others. It drives me demented that a lot of people who share these sensational science stories on social media and elsewhere don’t grasp this. Scientific experiments are designed by humans, and humans, even the ones with biology degrees, are not perfect and they make mistakes and overlook stuff. That’s why no scientist reads a single scientific paper and throws everything they know out of the window. It’s why no findings of any study are taken seriously until they’ve been tested and reproduced, many times, by other scientists, perhaps on the other side of the world and ideally with no connection to the original group or to each other.

So as a scientist, what you and a whole lot of other geeks around the world do next is throw a whole lot of bunches of phones in with a whole lot of parcels of the global lab rat community; and once you hear back from the other geeks and can rule out anything else that might be causing the poor little buggers to grow tumors, then you might be able to assert with some authority that cellphones cause cancer.

(Just as an aside, in the real world, this hasn’t happened yet and the research efforts so far are not looking promising for the cancerphone hypothesis.)

Oh, and another thing. You’re not done even then. All you have, after all that work, is circumstantial evidence. You can’t simply assert that the data show the phones caused the tumors and leave it at that. Next you need to show the mechanism by which this is happening. What is it about the phones that triggers tumor cell growth in the rats? Until and unless you can find that out, there still might be something you and all your white lab coated friends have overlooked that’s causing lumpy rodents instead. That’s a whole new voyage of research and one you guys might not even be qualified to embark on. Anyway, the work continues.

Or, you all realize it’s more likely than not that you’re chasing shadows and it’s probably just because rats age fast and old animals (including humans) are much more vulnerable to cancer than younger ones, and so you decide to clock out and go to the pub.

Which probably won’t impress the rats much, but oh well.

All of which is to say that you’ll forgive me if I decline to be wowed by the sensational story you just forwarded me on Instagram citing a study from Impressive Sounding Name University which says we’re all going to grow extra stomachs and die horribly within five years unless we go back to our old flip phones. There’s a whole slew of things I blame the Samsung in my pocket for, but absent more compelling data, finding cysts on my nuts isn’t going to be one of them.

In any case, as I remarked, this whole topic is just an illustration. Just in general, before sending me that forward, you want to check the background. (Well, maybe not want to – maybe what you want to do is inform me that I have developed an amazing ability to communicate using the lower portion of my digestive tract – but you should.) If you’re going to come at me, do so over my understanding of science, not because you’re convinced your friend Harriet, God rest her soul, would be alive today if she hadn’t been in the habit of shoving her BlackBerry down her bra. Sometimes you need to see what’s in the big picture before you can (p)hone in on the details. (See what I did there?) Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day.