The bad press of scientists

SCIENCE:Scientists can get a bad press and they don't do too well in movie portrayals either. White coat, mad hair, thick glasses, geekie behaviour-it has to be a scientist.

It is not as though this stereotype scientist doesn't exist. I have seen them and I promise you they do. Happily they are an exception, yet the popular portrayal is so imbedded in the public mind that the stereotype just won't go away.

Mind you, scientists don't always help their cause. Most people don't understand what scientists do or how they do it so the punter asks a simple question, "What are you studying?"

"Well I am glad you asked that, I am studying genes and the proteins they express in drosophila - that is a fruit fly you know - because lots of them are the same as in humans and they do the same thing in both species. Have I told you I have been studying drosophila genes for 35 years? No? Well they are fascinating!"

How can someone study drosophila genes for 35 years? A scientist might point out it is just as unreal to hear a marketing guy admitting he has spent 35 years trying to convince consumers they should buy and eat cornflakes.

But what the cornflake guy does seems more understandable than what the scientist does, so people nudge their neighbour and look up to heaven when it comes to drosophila, but nod sagely when it comes to cornflakes.

One problem with this is it makes people dubious about the value and importance of a given piece of research. The editor of Innovation recently pointed to the apparent contradiction in two recent pieces of research on caffeine, one saying it helped protect women from ovarian cancer and another that said it increased the risk of miscarriage during pregnancy.

So is caffeine good for you or bad for you? Both were correct I don't doubt given they were destined for publication in leading scientific journals. Nor was there a contradiction, given each was dealing with completely different situations. Yet they were taken to be contradictory and were labelled as questionable because of this.

One way to have confidence in a piece of research is to note where it has been published, and more particularly whether the publication selects stories on the basis of peer review.

This means the research has been scrutinised by fellow scientists who are generally alarmingly enthusiastic about trashing a colleague's work if flaws can be spotted in it.

There are top shelf publications such as Science, Nature and Physical Review to name just three. There are also middle ranking and lower echelon publications. While scientists aspire to publication in the top shelf titles, it is not such a bad thing to see your work appear in a lesser publication.

There are many critics of the peer review process who argue it is possible to tamper with the system.

Reviewers can be got at or have agendas and publications can be influenced by advertisers, they claim. Even so, the system works reasonably well and the public can usually have confidence in research that appears in a reviewed publication.

There are exceptions of course and these are sought out diligently by a group called Improbable Research who publish the Annals of Improbable Research and who also dish out the annual Ig Nobel Awards, special prizes that celebrate research which is, well, improbable. And some of this research gets published in respected peer reviewed publications.

Take for example the 2007 Ig Nobel prize for medicine, which went to a research paper published in the British Medical Journal. Its title: "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects".

The physics prize went to two Chilean scientists who made a name for themselves studying how sheets become wrinkled. They published in Nature, Physical Review Letters and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (all top shelf) with titles such as "Wrinkling of an elastic sheet under tension" and "Geometry and physics of wrinkling".

The chemistry prize went to Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre of Japan for his discovery of a way to extract vanilla flavouring from cow dung (nice one Mayu).

And two linguists from the University of Barcelona captured an Ig Nobel for showing, in the words of the citation, "that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards".

Who says science can't be fun?

u Find the full list of 2007 Ig Nobel prizes at Improbable Research's website, www.improbable.com