Episode 85: Transcript

Episode: 85: Science criminals!

Transcription by Keffy

Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction, science, and everything else. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of a new book about archaeology called Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:14] I'm Charlie Jane Anders, the author of a brand new young adult novel called Victories Greater Than Death.

Annalee: [00:00:23] Speaking of Death! This week, we're going to be talking about true science crime. What does it mean to commit a science crime? How does it fit into the true crime genre, which we know and love? And what are some of the ongoing crimes of science that are haunting us today, both in the world of the news and in fiction? All right, let's do some crimes!

[00:00:51] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion. 

Charlie Jane: [00:01:19] Okay, so Annalee, obviously, we're all obsessed with true crime as a genre. But what is a true science crime? What does that even mean?

Annalee: [00:01:26] So I'm coming up with this as sort of a sub-genre of true crime, there may actually be someone out there who's like written an entire dissertation about true science crime. But I'm just using it very casually to mean anytime you have a story about crime that revolves around a scientist, or science, or some kind of act that's being done in the name of scientific progress. And the way it fits in with true crime stories is that these kinds of stories are often true, or they're kind of the legend based on the truth. 

[00:02:04] And I want to trace this genre back to the story of Galileo, who was arrested for defending heliocentrism, which is the theory that the sun is at the center of our solar system. And at the time that Galileo was defending this idea, it was not an accepted theory. Scientists were kind of divided, the church was not psyched about the idea that the earth wasn't the center of the universe. So it became a matter of state politics. And as I said, Galileo was put under house arrest and he spent almost the final decade of his life unable to go out into the world and do anything. He was basically in prison. That was until he died. 

Charlie Jane: [00:02:54] So you're kind of defining the original science crime as being like a crime against science, kind of, like a crime of suppressing science. 

Annalee: [00:03:02] Yeah, I think so. And it's a crime involving a scientist. And the reason why I kind of want that to be our original crime is because it shares a lot of characteristics of crime stories. Because remember, true crime isn't always about the criminal actually, being a bad guy. One of the things I love about the podcast, Criminal, is that oftentimes, it deals with ideas of what we think of as criminal. And then later on, we actually decide, oh, maybe that wasn't a crime, maybe that guy shouldn't have been under house arrest. 

[00:03:38] And so I think in the world of science, Galileo's arrest is kind of the original story of that kind of overlap between the crime story and science story. And it's kind of at the dawn of science. Science begins as a crime.

Charlie Jane: [00:03:57] Right.

Annalee: [00:03:57] A crime against God and a crime against the State. And so, I think it's important to remember that. That science is a criminal enterprise from its outset. And now obviously, it's evolved to be very different.

Charlie Jane: [00:04:13] So this is actually not an instance where it's a crime against it. It's an instance of like, for example, if you were arrested for having marijuana or if you were arrested for listening to rap music after nine o'clock in a place where that's illegal.

Annalee: [00:04:25] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:04:26] It’s an instance of something being technically a crime in the eyes of the authorities or in the eyes of like the people in power, but nobody in their right mind, nobody nowadays, would agree that this was actually a crime. And so it was like kind of... It was a crime only because the laws were unfair.

Annalee: [00:04:41] Yeah, I think that's true. And I think that's true of a lot of crime, right? I mean, like you said, you know, people being arrested for possessing cannabis. Just even a few years ago, you could be thrown in jail for a really long time in the United States and still can be in many states.

Charlie Jane: [00:04:56] There still are people locked away for the you know, it's insane.

Annalee: [00:05:00] Yeah, so and that's the thing about crime is that sometimes true crime is the story of a criminal who is, say, doing things in the name of science. And sometimes true crime is the story of someone who's very valiantly trying to do science and gets criminalized by their society. 

Charlie Jane: [00:05:17] Right

Annalee: [00:05:19] But I think that when we talk about modern day science crime, Charlie Jane, what comes to mind for you? It's not really Galileo being righteously indignant in his chambers, is it?

Charlie Jane: [00:05:31] Well, I think it's interesting to think about that sort of dichotomy between the crime that’s not really a crime, like Galileo’s where it's just that people are being ignorant and kind of opposing the science. And then the crime that maybe isn't illegal, but should be, in a sense. 

Annalee: [00:05:49] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:05:49] And what we've seen in the last, I don't know, century, I guess, is that science has committed a lot of what many of us would consider to be crimes or atrocities. And obviously, there's the atomic bomb. There's the destruction of our natural habitat by pollution. And by carbon being released to the atmosphere. There's a bunch of other stuff that science has done, which is criminal. But then on the other side, you have environmentalists who are trying to protect our habitat, trying to protect the planet, but who are kind of seen as criminal and in some cases actually persecuted.

Annalee: [00:06:23] Or fired from their jobs. Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:06:25] Yeah, and stigmatized for their kind of science. So the notion of what is a science crime has become really slippery, because of that dichotomy you mentioned of crime being kind of in the eye of the beholder. And the classic trope is the scientist who feels misunderstood or kind of Frankenstein figure who feels like society won't accept what they're doing. But actually, they are doing something, that according to their lights, is good. And it all does go back to Galileo in a way. So it makes it hard to kind of separate. 

Annalee: [00:06:53] Yeah, it's so true. And I think the thing about the atomic bomb is that these scientists who were working on the bomb, were considered heroes. And when you see newsreels from the time, there's this weird celebratory side to it. But then also, they admit that this is horrible.

Newsreel Clip: [00:07:15] And now the bomb, the marvel and the horror of our time has exploded. Inside the holocaust, cameras record the havoc.

Charlie Jane: [00:07:26] Oh man.

Annalee: [00:07:27] The other piece of this, and this is something that we're going to talk about more later in the episode is that health related crimes are a huge part of this now, in the modern world. And this, I would trace back in the United States to the Tuskegee experiments, which was a long running experiment on Black men, where doctors diagnosed them with syphilis and didn't treat them even though they had penicillin and could have treated them just to find out what would happen if people didn't get treated for syphilis. Which, I think we already had hundreds of years of knowing what happened to people who weren't treated for syphilis. So it was really part of a much larger systemic problem in the United States, where white doctors and scientists had been experimenting on Black people for a really long time. And it was just that they got caught with the Tuskegee experiment.

Charlie Jane: [00:08:21] Right? It's this notion that certain bodies are disposable, certain types of people are good scientific research subjects, because we don't care what happens to them. And so we're just going to use and exploit them.

Annalee: [00:08:34] Yeah, it's the same thing that we see in the Nazi experiments in concentration camps during World War II. And it, again, is this kind of idea that well, it's for the good of science and scientists sort of telling themselves, even though they know they're hurting people, that it's somehow worth it. Even though I think we would agree that these are criminal acts, and in many cases, people were later prosecuted for those crimes.

Charlie Jane: [00:09:02] Yeah. And when I was in college, I was digging in choirs. A group of us were hired to go to Germany and sing it as a choir for this guy who turned out to be kind of a Holocaust denier. And he spent like a week kind of lecturing us about how the Holocaust hadn't really been that bad. Which, some of us were Jewish. That was not a great experience for us. 

Annalee: [00:09:24] Not a great way to meet someone in Germany.

Charlie Jane: [00:09:27] No, it was the first time I'd ever talked to somebody who was like a straight up Holocaust denier or minimizer and the thing that he kept saying to us was that well, if you in the United States think that the Holocaust was so bad, why did you then use all of the data from all those rocket experiments that the Nazis did in World War II? And why did you basically like use the Nazi rocket program to jumpstart your own rocket program after World War II? You used the data, therefore you are complicit in those abuses, if they even happened, which he was like, oh whatever. It wasn't even real. But if it did happen, you're complicit in it. 

[00:10:02] And that's the classic dilemma, I guess. If you do science that involves abuse or involves trampling on people's rights, is that data tainted? Is the information that we get from it tainted? If we use it and potentially save millions of lives in some cases, are we kind of accessories after the fact to the crime?

Annalee: [00:10:20] Yeah. And I think this goes to one of the really big themes in true science crime, which is that progress has a dark side. That in order to progress, we have to do bad things. And I don't believe that that's true. I don't think we have to progress by doing bad things. But that's part of the myth. And maybe that goes back to the fact that scientists were treated like criminals for a long time. Maybe it's kind of this internalized idea that like, well, we're already sort of bad guys. So we might as well just do something kind of shady.

Charlie Jane: [00:10:55] Yeah, well, I think it is also just the idea that the pursuit of knowledge is sort of noble in itself. And also, I mean, it's inseparable from capitalism, because a lot of the modern-day science crimes are the result of capitalism being like, our notion of progress is just economic growth. And the ability to keep exploiting resources as quickly as possible, as efficiently as possible. And screw anybody who gets hurt, screw the planet, if it gets hurt. 

[00:11:21] My whole life, basically, I've had this sense that we're in a race against time, between the dark side and the light side of progress, that if we can make progress fast enough, we might be able to learn stuff that would help us to mitigate the harm that we're doing, right? Or we might be able to colonize other planets, in which case, who cares if we destroyed this one? But also maybe we’ll have the singularity and the singularity will help us to fix our broken environment, maybe all of these terrible things we're doing will lead us to us discovering something that will allow us to like remove carbon from the atmosphere without horrible side effects. 

[00:11:56] So I feel like that's the Faustian bargain in a way that we've been making that if we just keep running as fast as possible, we can outrun the negative parts of what we've been doing.

Annalee: [00:12:03] Yeah, it's kind of this idea that we can outrun our own crimes. And then I think the other side of that argument and what draws us back to true crime stories, and fictional stories that are kind of based on crime, is this sense that you actually can't outrun it. That if you commit a crime, if you engage in an atrocity in order to invent something great, that that thing isn't very great actually. That in fact, it will always be tainted, it will be haunted, and eventually it will destroy you. So that's a thought.

Charlie Jane: [00:12:42] On that cheerful note, let's take a break. And then when we come back, we're going to talk about science criminals.

[00:12:49] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.

Ad: [00:12:54] Imagine technology that knows you from the inside out.

That sees you in detail no one has ever seen before. 

That can take you back to the person you were.

Before anything bad or painful happened. 

Because you're still that person.

Because you’re still that person.

Because you’re still that person.

Just press rewind. 

And be her.

Again.

Again.

Again.

IO.

An original podcast from Phantom Customer Media. 

Visit io-podcast.com to learn more.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:40] So Annalee, as someone who is obsessed with the true crime genre, part of the true crime genre is that it's about characters. It's about following characters who are victims or perpetrators or who are kind of these fascinating people who make these really fascinating choices. What kind of characters do we see in the science crime story genre?

Annalee: [00:14:03] So I want to start by talking about mad scientists, because these are people who-

Charlie Jane: [00:14:10] Muahahahaha!

Annalee: [00:14:11] Yes. They inhabit our science fiction, but they also inhabit a lot of these crime stories. And we've had so many interesting fictional shows or semi-fictional shows recently, Chernobyl and Manhattan, which kind of go over you know, major horrible things that happened due to atomics.

Chernobyl clip: [00:14:33] Dyatlov broke every rule we have. He pushed a reactor to the brink of destruction. He did these things believing there was a failsafe: AZ-5, a simple button to shut it all down. But in the circumstances he created, there wasn’t. The shutdown system had a fatal flaw.

Annalee: [00:14:58] What was interesting about those shows is that they unpacked what happened and kind of revealed the humanity of the people behind them. But then you have stuff like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which makes me think about the Tuskegee experiments a little bit, because it's really the story of kind of a science victim. It's not really about the scientists. I mean, it is a little bit, but the book and then of course, it became an Oprah Winfrey movie, which is pretty cool. 

Henrietta Lacks Clip: [00:15:29] What you don't understand is we didn't know nothing ‘bout nothing.

Everyone's saying Henrietta Lacks donated them cells. She didn't donate nothing. They took them and didn't ask.

Henrietta helped develop the AIDS cocktail, chemotherapy treatments.

Annalee: [00:15:51] It's about how doctors who were trying to figure out cancer, they were trying to create a line of cells that they could study that would be perpetually accessible. Cells that they could keep growing and growing and growing and they hadn't been able to do that. And then they found this woman, Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman who was suffering from cancer, and they harvested some of her cells. And they became immortal, those cells are still growing in labs all over the world. And they became the source for a ton of studies that helped deal with a lot of disease. 

[00:16:33] And Henrietta Lacks’s family was never told that this happened. Henrietta Lacks was not asked permission to donate her cells. And a lot of companies were making a shit ton of money off of products from those experiments on her cells. And so there was kind of an economic crime. There was sort of this ongoing crime that was revealed during the Tuskegee experiments where white doctors were just experimenting on Black people, because they felt like they could. It's such a compelling story, because it's kind of tracking what happens when scientists do engage in this behavior. That's not technically illegal, but it's unethical, and how it affects the lives of Henrietta Lacks’s children and family. I think that's a really fascinating example of this kind of character. 

[00:17:27] What are characters that you like to see or that you're interested in when it comes to modern day science criminals?

Charlie Jane: [00:17:33] I mean, I'm obviously fascinated with the figure of the mad scientist. I've written some mad scientist in my time. And I like the notion of somebody who's just has kind of wacky ideas like I don't know, Walter Bishop in the TV show Fringe comes to mind. And any number of other like Dr. Frankenstein, obviously, any number of other fictional mad scientists. I feel like that kind of larger-than-life kind of colorful figure. Which J. Robert Oppenheimer is a figure that I think about a lot, because of his sort of epic remorse, but also his like determination to do this thing, which he then regrets. 

[00:18:13] I feel like I've seen different portrayals of J. Robert Oppenheimer, over time that are, super fascinating. But I think that that kind of figure, the kind of remorseful mad scientist who was determined at all costs to make a discovery and then felt terrible about it is one kind of strand. And then there is the kind of strand of mad scientist who doesn't ask for informed consent, doesn't give you enough information to make the informed consent meaningful. 

[00:18:13] And that's kind of what we're getting at with Henrietta Lacks, with a lot of these other experiments that have been done, medical experiments, in which people really didn't know what they were signing up for. And you have all these psychological experiments, like in the 1970s, and ‘60s, you have the obviously the Milgram experiment is a famous one. We've talked before about the Stanford Prison Experiment. There’s a reason now why you have these big institutional review boards for psychological experiments, because there was a sense that we really needed to make sure that when there's human subjects involved in research, especially psychological research, but also definitely clinical research, that they need to know what they're getting into.

Annalee: [00:19:21] Yeah, and I think those IRBs,the institutional review boards. It's not just for psychological experiments, it's exactly to prevent the kind of thing that happened with Henrietta Lacks, and it’s any kind of experiment on humans. We can't just keep going along, saying that, oh, well, because this person is disempowered and has really no access to the police, let's just steal her cells and who cares? 

[00:19:49] We do have these measures in place, but I feel like the mad doctor keeps out running laws. You know what I mean? The figure of the mad doctor. There’s always a new way to engage in mad science, which is, you’ve somehow circumvented the IRB.

Charlie Jane: [00:20:03] Well, and I think that part of what happens is that now we have the IRB for research that's done in the university setting. But what about research that's done in the corporate setting? What about big, incredibly wealthy corporations or startups or whatever, that have kind of experiments that they're doing, or kind of scientific projects that they're doing. And they don't necessarily have to adhere to the same ethical guidelines that a university might have to.

Annalee: [00:20:30] And that makes me think of another major figure in the gallery of science criminals, which is the scammer, or the quack. This is something that goes again, way back in the 18th century, in the 19th century, quacks were the bane of people's existence. They would like tell you—

Charlie Jane: [00:20:49] Literal snake oil. 

Annalee: [00:20:51] Yeah, they'd sell you literal snake oil. And I think that today, with a lot of these health care cures that you can get. A quack doctor can be something that's pretty dark, like the famous case in Texas with the doctor who was nicknamed Dr. Death. And then there was a podcast that was about him called Dr. Death. And he was convicted of maiming one of his patients, and also allegedly may have contributed to the death of some other ones. And so a quack can be anything from something really terrible and terrifying like that to just someone who's say, a Dr. Oz type person who's like, green coffee beans are great, and you should buy my green coffee beans. And there's no actually proven efficacy of green coffee beans.

Charlie Jane: [00:21:44] Yeah. And you know, there's this whole crossover now between specifically right-wing kind of media figures and selling questionable, shall we say, health supplements and health benefits.

Annalee: [00:21:54] Yeah, exactly. That that could be classified, for sure, as snake oil. And one of the things that I think is so funny is that the scammers and the quacks seem to kind of group together. I just watched the documentary about WeWork, which is as corporation that was incredibly overvalued. And then it was sort of revealed as a giant scam. And the husband and wife team who ran WeWork, the wife's cousin is Gwyneth Paltrow, who runs Goop. And of course, Goop has been accused repeatedly of selling scammy products. They've been sued for misrepresenting the health properties of their products. 

[00:22:38] And so, you know, many people would think of that as a kind of a scammy health company. And now it's associated with this scammy tech company, the WeWork company, which of course, was never a tech company. And that was kind of the scam, is that they were actually a real estate company. But they kept raising money from VCs, as if they were a tech company. It was an amazingly intricate and bizarre. 

[00:23:02] My most famous scammer, best science scammer of the decade has to be Elizabeth Holmes, who ran Theranos, which has become famous, both in the gossip pages and because there was a documentary about it, called The Inventor , there's been like a billion stories written about her.

Theranos Clip: [00:23:21] When I think of Theranos I really feel like there were two entirely different worlds. There was the carpeted world, and there was the tiled world. And the carpeted world was where Elizabeth was a goddess. And then you go onto the tile side, and nothing works. We're on a sinking ship. I would leave the tiled world thinking, oh, man sinking ship. And I would go have one conversation with Elizabeth.

[00:23:43] Theranos was founded with the goal of [crosstalk] understand your body.

[00:23:50] And I would be so motivated to go back and work and I felt like I was changing the world again. And go back into the tiled world, and I’d go wait, what just happened?

Annalee: [00:24:00] She's still evading jail time. Now she's pregnant. So her trial has been postponed. And she's basically become just kind of an object of gossip journalism. She's not even really a scientist anymore. If she ever was. Which, she wasn’t, she was an entrepreneur. 

[00:24:19] So that's the kind of true crime figure that I think is really of our time. 

Charlie Jane: [00:24:24] It's the startup culture, it's the entrepreneurship, it’s the idea that we're a scrappy startup company, we're gonna break things, we're gonna like… There's this whole kind of American religion around startups now that is very tied in with all of our worst, weirdest ideas about ourselves. And a lot of these new snake oil people kind of play into that for sure.

Annalee: [00:24:45] Yeah, one of the things that came up in both the documentary about Theranos called The Inventor and the WeWork documentary, when they would interview people about the companies, they'd say, well, you know, there's this idea in Silicon Valley of fake it till you make it. And in both cases, those companies got so much money because the investors were like, yeah, that's kind of what's going on. It's like a fake it till you make it thing, but they'll make it and it'll be fine. 

[00:25:12] So in a sense, built into the Silicon Valley quest for this unicorn company that's going to make a ton of money, is this idea that like, yeah, it's gonna be kind of scammy at first. That's just the nature of investment. 

[00:25:25] So Charlie, Jane, what's another major figure in science crime stories?

Charlie Jane: [00:25:30] I mean, I think another major figure is the sort of evil corporate overlord, who is a familiar icon from both fiction and reality. Like the idea that we're going to dump toxins into the ocean, and we're going to destroy the rain forest. And we're going to basically wreck entire ecosystems in the name of some marginal amount of profit or some marginal amount of economic growth. And I think that that's kind of like the foundational science villain or science criminal of our time. Because we are all kind of like, we're in California, wildfire season just started, we're bracing ourselves for another few months of maybe not being able to go outside because the air is gonna be full of smoke. And there's a bunch of factors behind it. But largely, it's because the 1% in corporate America decided that they didn't care about filling the atmosphere with carbon if it led to slightly more economic growth, or slightly more shareholder benefits.

Annalee: [00:26:33] Yeah, I recently read Nathaniel Rich's new book called Second Nature, which is about the environment. And he kind of structures that… It's nonfiction but he structures it a lot like a true crime story. He sort of begins the book by talking about how all these people in a small town suddenly noticed that their river had turned a weird color. And cows started dying in these horrific ways. Cows were drinking from the river. And it very much felt like either the opening of like an X-Files episode, or like the beginning of some kind of crime show where it's like, here's the scene where they died, what happened? Although not that cheesy, it's actually quite chilling and upsetting. 

[00:27:19] And then he spends a really long time kind of unraveling the mystery. And following this lawyer, who basically picks up a paper trail and realizes that it is, in fact, a science crime where this corporation or a set of corporations knew that there was this chemical that they were using in their manufacturing that was toxic, and they hid it from the public. And they just kept using it to make a variety of industrial applications and just didn't care. And denied it when people would say like, actually, our animals are dying. Some people start getting sick. And so that, to me, is like the perfect example of that, where it's like, yeah, this is it's a crime against humanity. And again, it's done in the name of progress and science and don't you want to have Saran Wrap? It's really important to have plastic. Suck it up, you or your cows are going to die.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:21] It's just so depressing. And like, the thing that I really want to come back to is that we started out talking about mad scientists and mad doctors, who I think of as being these sort of exuberant, larger than life kind of fun, eccentric characters who are like, muahahaha! And even if they're doing terrible things, they're kind of in a weird way, I want to say almost lovable because—or if they're the remorseful J. Robert Oppenheimer type. It's like, well, I was trying to serve the greater good. I was trying to stop the war. I was trying to do… Or there was a really important reason I was doing this and I feel bad now. But they’re very relatable human beings.

[00:28:59] And even a scammer, you can kind of look at them and be like, sometimes scammers are kind of… There's like a whole genre of storytelling about lovable rogues, who go around scamming people and who are like quacks who are just… I’m thinking about, there’s this famous Chinese short story called 开市大吉, by Lao She which is about this group of people who basically set up a company where they're selling actually a fake cure for syphilis that's just green tea. They're just injecting green tea into people's veins, I think. And it's kind of a cute funny story about people who are going to die in horrible agony because they think they got to care for syphilis, that this was even before penicillin. So there's something kind of lovable about mad scientists and even about quacks. 

[00:29:40] But when you think about the corporate overlords who are dumping poison into our rivers in the name of like a slight amount of increased quarterly profits. There's nothing lovable or joyful about that character in my mind. They're just kind of assholes, I guess. Is the best best term I can come up with?

Annalee: [00:30:01] I think it's… I think they're evil. And I think that’s the lure of true crime is to try to understand evil and to try to figure out what's the difference between evil and someone who's just bumbling or egotistical, or a rogue, or mentally ill. Sometimes that's when a true crime story is truly chilling is when you realize, oh, fuck, this person is just evil. It's like they're not misled. They're not suffering from delusions. They're just, they want to hurt people, and they're getting off on it. So on that note, let's turn to the coronavirus and talk about the science crimes of our day.

[00:30:50] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops. 

Annalee: [00:31:01] We've been talking about scammers, we've been talking about people who are evil and mad scientists. And I wanted to remind you of one of the great weird scammy moments that we all experienced in the United States during the pandemic. And it's this famous speech.

Trump Clip: [00:31:20] Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it's ultraviolet, or just very powerful light. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, you can which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you're gonna test that, too? Sounds interesting. 

Charlie Jane: [00:31:38] That was very enlightening. 

Annalee: [00:31:41] Exactly. So what do you think Charlie Jane? Has the coronavirus pandemic led to new kinds of scams? I feel like that speech from Trump crystallized for a lot of people, this giant disconnect between real science and the kind of scammy science that was in our former president’s mind. But were there other… Do you feel like anti-vaxing and anti-masking are a kind of science crime? Or do you think it's something else?

Charlie Jane: [00:32:13] I think it absolutely comes full circle right back to Galileo. And I think it's like, it's a crime against science again. And I think that in some parts of the country, and in some parts of our communities, there was a kind of stigmatizing of science that amounted to criminalizing science. And that there were large amounts of people in the government, in local and national government, and in our communities, who were so anti-science that they actually wanted to turn accurate, helpful, beneficial science into a kind of crime. 

[00:32:49] So you could look at it either way, like a crime against science, or criminalizing of science. What I think is really interesting about this era, and looking at the response to COVID. But also the response to talking about climate change, and some other ways in which there are large movements of people who are anti-science in this country, is that there's a kind of unholy alliance between corporations, which we just established are committing science crimes in the sense that they're destroying the environment and destroying people's lives with careless use of technology and innovation. They have an unholy alliance with this anti-science movement in a lot of cases, which is actually opposed to any kind of innovation or any kind of search for knowledge. And it's just like, they're kind of, in a sense, pushing in opposite directions, but they've decided that they can use each other for now.

Annalee: [00:33:40] Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. But there is this weird alliance that takes place between, I guess what you would call legitimate science. I mean, it's science that's destroying the environment, but then it connects up with this anti-science part of the government. 

[00:33:57] I was thinking also about how, when you have all this disruption and all this confusion around what's true, like which science to believe or which leader to believe, it opens people up for all kinds of other scams. So, for example, there was so much misinformation about the coronavirus online. Like, people passing around emails about how if you just like drank a lot of orange juice or took a lot of vitamin C, you would get rid of the virus or—

Charlie Jane: [00:34:34] Oh my God.

Annalee: [00:34:34] Or, if you got vaccinated that you would never be able to get pregnant again. Or there was the scammer in Philly who was trying to tell people he would get them vaccines if they signed up and gave him money. Scam Goddess did a great podcast about that. So there's just like all kinds of ways that this unregulated fear, basically this this confusion leads to all kinds of new kinds of scams. You can mess with people's minds so easily when half the country is desperate to get a vaccine, the other half is desperate to believe that the vaccine is unnecessary because this is all just a big lie anyway and there's no real coronavirus. All the scammers thrive in the whatever crack is opened up between those two sides. Whatever, dank, weird crack that is.

Charlie Jane: [00:35:27] Yeah, I mean, I think that part of the thing about empiricism and evidence based decision making and evidence based knowledge is that they are inimical to a certain kind of, to having a cult of personality, and to having a sense that we're just gonna do whatever we want. Because if you're committed to actually following the evidence and being empirical, you have to actually do what the evidence says. And that puts constraints on people in power, which they don't want to have. And so I think there's a whole, there's actually kind of a science of disinformation, about science now. It's become like a whole kind of anti-science science that's being practiced by a lot of people on the internet now, which is fascinating and horrifying to think about. 

[00:36:14] I did a piece for IO9, back in the the mists of time about AIDS denialism. And there was this whole strand of people in the ‘80s, but even into the ‘90s, well into the ‘90s, who were claiming that HIV was a myth, that HIV was fake. And that if you just took vitamins, you would get rid of AIDS, these sorts of things. People legitimately don't want to trust the medical establishment because of things like the Tuskegee experiments, and because of countless other things, but also because they feel talked down to by experts. And so they want to believe that they can kind of take matters into their own hands and just take some vitamins or that the drug companies are evil, and so any drug is going to be compromised. And often, it's legitimate doubts and concerns about like these giant corporations that actually turn into an anti-science movement. And, you know.

Annalee: [00:37:05] Yeah, it’s interesting. So science crimes lead to the criminalization of science kind of in the wrong way. And I think that—

Charlie Jane: [00:37:13] I think so, yeah. 

Annalee: [00:37:14] That goes back to a little bit of what I was saying about all the confusion and fear around the pandemic, and also around climate change, for that matter. There is a lot of fear around that, and a lot of uncertainty. And I think you've already summed up a lot of what that leads to. And I think one other thing I wanted to throw in the mix here is that science and evidence-based reasoning, are very complex. And they do require you to trust experts, who in many cases, like say, Dr. Death, don't have your best interests in mind. And it's very hard if you're trying to figure out the truth for yourself and people are presenting you with really complicated scientific papers and saying, well, we did all this stuff in the lab, just trust us, it's fine. No, you can't visit the lab. No, if you came to the lab, it would be hard for us to explain. And actually, half of the science experiments took place in England, and like they took place over here. So you couldn't even visit all the places that we did this experiment in. 

[00:38:23] It's really hard to swallow that. If you're already anxious, and you're already feeling like scientists have done wrong by your community, or corporations run by scientists or corporations using science have done wrong by your community. So I think it's part of the scientific project that we need to maybe think about. That we need to think about how do we make it more transparent so that people do have more trust in it?

Charlie Jane: [00:38:49] And I think that the other part of it is that sometimes scientific findings get overhyped. And that—

Annalee: [00:38:54] Yes.

Charlie Jane: [00:38:54] There's like one study that shows a very inconclusive result with perhaps within the margin of error or whatever. But this somehow turns in the media into—

Annalee: [00:39:08] Cure for cancer! 

Charlie Jane: [00:39:09] Cure for cancer, yeah. If you just eat like a rutabaga once a week, you will live forever, or whatever, which, you know, I'm sure the rutabaga farmers would love if that became—

Annalee: [00:39:19] I heard it was if you eat peanut butter cups, like at least a couple times a day. Are you saying that's not true?

Charlie Jane: [00:39:24] The benefits of peanut butter cups have been fully established by peer reviewed—

Annalee: [00:39:30] Ok, good.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:30] Double blinded control group science. There's no question about the medical benefits of eating peanut butter cups at least five times a day. Like, at least. At least.

Annalee: [00:39:41] Okay, good. I'm glad that I'm on the right path.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:46] I mean, no question. Oh, my God. Yeah. No. I think that—

Annalee: [00:39:48] Thank you, Dr. Anders.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:51] Scientific results sometimes get overhyped. Sometimes there's like this whole replication crisis that people talk about. I think the social sciences especially have a whole tendency to kind of confirm our biases in a way that's very seductive. And then later you realize that that study was actually like three people, one of whom was in a coma or something, and we just—

Annalee: [00:40:13] Or one of whom was the actual scientist conducting the study. 

Charlie Jane: [00:40:17] Right. So, you know, there are reasons for people to be skeptical about science, I think.

Annalee: [00:40:23] eah, there's reasons for people to be skeptical about science. And I think going forward, we have to separate out science crime, from the reality of how most science is done, which is pretty mundane. There are no cackling people in lab coats who are controlling the world. Or who are running corporations that control the world. Yeah, that happens once in a while. Once in a while you get a company like Theranos, that really does get tons of money for something that apparently doesn't exist. But most science is not like that. And I think, because crime stories are so enticing and so fascinating, we tend to look at those outlier stories as being the truth about the entire scientific endeavor. 

[00:41:18] And of course, it doesn't help that that science is very hard to understand. And crime is a lot easier to understand than science. And so if we can fit science into that crime framework, it's weirdly reassuring, even though it's also really terrifying. And so I think it's great that we have an understanding of how science can go wrong. But it's also important for us to hold in mind that science has been criminalized by people who also were doing wrong. 

[00:41:49] So this is this ongoing tug of war, and it's the tug of war over progress. It's a tug of war over the legitimacy of science. And I suspect we're going to be having these debates for centuries to come. 

[00:42:06] All right, that was my wrapping up. Veronica’s even smiling.

Charlie Jane: [00:42:09] Nice. 

Annalee: [00:42:15] All right, thank you so much for listening to another episode of Our Opinions Are Correct. You can find us anywhere you find podcasts about things and science and all kinds of other stuff. You can support us on Patreon. We're at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. And if you sign up, we're gonna give you cool extras. We have audio extras. We post weird essays that will make your brain explode. But in a good way, like a non-fatal way. It's not like a crime. Yay. And you can follow us on Twitter at @OOACpod. 

[00:42:48] Thank you so much to our wonderful science criminal producer Veronica Simonetti. And thank you to Chris Palmer for the music and we'll be back in your ears in two weeks. Bye. 

Charlie Jane: [00:43:01] Bye.

[00:43:05] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.