Chemistry vs. Viruses

WHY HAS PUBLIC INTEREST IN SCIENCE BEEN KILLED?

Horizon, the BBC’s “flagship” science programme, recently ran an episode entitled ‘Why do Viruses Kill?’ If you tuned in, however, and were hoping for an explanation of this, or, indeed, any other single scientific fact, in what is a full 60 minute documentary, you would have ended up sorely disappointed.

In the first five minutes, against the cheesy musical backdrop of horror-film strings, we are told that the swine flu virus is a “mysterious agent”, one “with the power to kill”, no less. This is all interspersed with micro-clips of hyperbolic TV news reports during the epidemic – just in case we fail to make the connection between what would otherwise be a totally bor-ring subject, and the more personalised reality of our own lives.

Viruses: “…we struggle to understand them.” You get a sinking feeling, though, that Horizon isn’t about to weigh in very forcefully in this particular battle of comprehension.

We are told that the pandemic was detected when some scientists in Atlanta found the “tell-tell” signs of emerging diseases. They look for “particular patterns … This one stood out.” What kind of patterns? What stood out? No explanation. A scientist tells us folksy stuff about how it happened on a Friday night, and how he and colleagues were getting excited. Cut to more stale news footage, and the next point… He also said (I’m guessing) lots of more interesting things about how their data is collated and how they actually interpret it, but this was edited out. Note, that would be the methodology, the insight – the science – that the programme makers left out, in favour of the hype. For my benefit, indeed, because why would I tune in to a science show to find out about science? Durr!

The programme carries on, and on, in the same vein. Viruses Are Like Us Because They Have Genes; They Are Ancient; They Are Both Dead and Alive; They Are Amazing Efficient. None of these dreary headline-style statements is ever substantiated. It is never brought to life by referencing what you might discover looking through a microscope, or through an account of any kind of research. (Apparently, describing how real experiments are done is forbidden on Horizon: the BBC2’s Science Department is like the Magic Circle). The facts aren’t even connected up to other gobbets of biological information, or anything. What is exactly is DNA again? Who cares! Hang on, if viruses have genes like us animals, why can’t they replicate on their own? Oooh, somebody’s getting ahead of themselves!

The disjointed, unsatisfying narrative plods on, and seems to build up to a sort of crescendo. You are pumped up higher and higher by every exciting claim, hoping you will eventually reach some plateau of understanding a fucking thing. A dude in a labcoat exclaims “viruses played such a critical role in the evolution of life on this planet, it’s hard to imagine life without them” (Awesome…!). And then you are let down – a little after the event – when you gradually realise (as it transpires that they’ve veered off, ADD-style, to a different point) that they aren’t ever going to allow him to tell us why.

You can picture some slick, smug, smart-suit-but-no-tie producer justifying the inanity of the script thusly: “we want to engage people who don’t have a scientific education”. But I don’t have a scientific education! I just have natural curiosity! Is that too much; would it so perilously narrow the appeal of the show if you ever sought to satisfy that? Does the producer envisage the average viewer is like a dog that’s been shown a card trick?

You do have to hand it to these philistines, however. It is a kind of reverse-Tardis technological miracle that in 60 minutes, they can squeeze so little content into the programme. How do they do it? Largely, it seems, through highly repetitious talking-head soundbites elicited from a bunch of interviewees. One scientist claims viruses “are a major component of all eco-systems on the planet… ”; before he is cut off, and another tells us that “… we don’t know how much we are dependent on viruses”, another says “our immune systems have been shaped by the threat of viruses”, and so on, until you promise never to ask again.

The basic problem here is that the talking head format is a rubbish way of delivering information about a subject that the informee isn’t already familiar. It works with the “I love TV 2009” / Grumpy Old Men type show, because the celebrities there are confirming, exploring and deconstructing experiences that we all recognise. Yet, if, instead, you are trying to get to the bottom of why some complicated accident occurred, and the 6 witnesses all start butting in telling different fragments of the story, you’d tell 5 of them to shut the fuck up so that the other can explain what happened. Which is kind of what you of feel like shouting at the telly during an episode of Horizon. Except you know you can’t really blame the ‘heads: it’s all the invisible, clumsy hand of the editor.

So the programme fails on its own terms. No-one, degree or no, with their frontal lobe intact could possible be engaged by this shallow froth.

But I think there is something more insidious in the way Horizon is served up. It implies that science is, and will always be, an impenetrable mystery for us mortals. That we have to take the experts’ say-so. The script is all “Professor Messy Hair believes that…” and “Scientists at the Boffin Institute think they have discovered…” To use the spot-on phrase of Ben Goldacre in his brilliant Bad Science book, this falsely treats science “… as an authority, rather than a method”. Goldacre was writing about pseudoscience (alternative medicine and other bullshit) – but there is a connection. Homeopaths; Gillian McKeith; people like Hwang Woo-Suk (who was caught fabricating the results of cloning research); any Creationist: you could stick them in front a camera and they would make all sorts of bold, telegenic claims, which would sound scarily similar to a Horizon soundbite. Given this is the BBC’s “flagship” science programme, perhaps it’s no wonder that so many people can’t seem to the difference.

Even worse, in my book, by completely excluding all of the detail, they are basically saying ‘experiments and equations are boring’. Yet, this is an area in which nothing – absolutely nothing – compares to actually understanding what’s going on. The most exciting bit in Richard Dawkins’ latest pop-science publication Greatest Show on Earth is a 15 page passage which describes, stage by stage, a single experiment to see if evolutionary change could occur in 12 flask-sized colonies of bacteria. As the author points out: “the details really contribute to the impact of the evidence … [and] every detail makes sense”. You see exactly how the scientists emulated the boom-bust conditions of life (by forcing each colony to survive on a finite, daily dose of glucose; the book explains, in turn, in even more tangible terms how this was done). You grasp the genius foresight of the researchers’ decision to split the 12 colonies using a neutral genetic market that allowed them to compare different colonies with each other and different generations with each. You learn how in all 12 colonies, the bacteria’s cell size increased over successive generations, and this could be plotted on a line describing a hyperbola in every case, but the steepness of the hyperbola was randomly different in different colonies… and then more and more amazing results; cleverer and cleverer methodology.

Almost every sentence in the 15 page passage is precious, yet bizarrely Dawkins feels obliged to apologise for going into so much detail. Meanwhile, if this is ever covered on Horizon, you’ll just get the headline “Scientists have even witnessed evolution happening, on a microscopic scale… in bacteria”, followed by five minutes of talking heads prompted to tell you how amazed they were, how Jed called them up right away, and how it happened on a Thursday evening just before they were about the drive home.

A show like Horizon almost certainly puts a lot of bright kids, already bored to tears by GCSE tedium, terminally off studying science, because – in its cynical, lunatic quest to be inclusive to the incurious – it implies that the intricate stuff – the essence of research – is dull and not worth talking about. That is unforgiveable. (Maybe it’s why I’m a lawyer rather than doing anything socially useful.)

What ultimately sends the villains who make Horizon to the gallows, however, is good old-fashioned, cut-and-dried, empirical evidence that it doesn’t have to be like this. This is provided by episode one of Professor Jim Al-Khalili’s awesome Chemistry: A Volatile History, on BBC4. Go on, watch it on Iplayer. I promise you won’t regret it. It tells the story of how we came to discover the chemical elements. Al-Khalili’s clever narrative is woven from colourful anecdotes about the madcap research of the pioneer chemists, and pithy explanations of what each had discovered, what this implied, and what still needed to be explained. Best of all, he performs a number of fully explained experiments on-screen, which are often re-enactments of great historical discoveries. We watch Al-Khalili sticking his hand into liquid mercury; distilling phosphorous from urine; following a recipe for making matches in Robert Boyle’s C17th century writings; adding zinc to hydrochloric acid to isolate hydrogen; blowing hydrogen through washing up liquid to create flammable bubbles; setting light to hydrogen in an upturned test-tube to ‘make water’ (the finding that killed the ancient idea that water is an element)…. and at least another 7 (by my count) vivid experiments in an hour-long episode. It’s engrossing stuff, and (for me, anyway) genuinely enlightening. There are no talking heads at all. It shows a difficult subject being brought to life, as opposed to killing its very soul. It pours a whole flask of 17^th Centrury urine over the modern theory that you can’t keep up people’s interest if you talk about details and try to explain what’s going on.

Compare Horizon’s “Virus” programme with Chemistry and the remedy is clear. Promote Jim Al-Khalili from BBC4 to running BBC2. Meanwhile, shoot whichever open-neck suit stole all the equations and experiments from our science programmes, and throw their body down a mineshaft, possibly to illustrate the effects of gravity.