by Will Storr
But there it was – the miserable truth. I heard it downstairs, less than an hour ago: ‘It’s incredibly important that people never get carried away with wishful thinking, with stuff they would like to be true.’
Mark the Skeptic was right, of course. And now that I have learned to mistrust myself, to realise that ‘instinct’ is merely ego-bolstering bias prancing about in the robes of wisdom, I am compelled to question why I would like so much for Mark to be wrong. I wonder if it relates to the truth hinted at by the university students who were asked to read the essay about Rasputin. The readers preferred him when his birthday matched their own. Without even being conscious of what was happening, something in their brains recognised a similarity and hugged the diabolical monk just a little bit closer. It seems to me that we spend our lives hunting for ourselves: we are moved by a novel when we recognise our experiences in those of the hero, just as we delight in the constellation of similarities that we discover in a new romantic partner. Perhaps we never really fall in love with someone else after all, and when we gaze into the eyes of our other half we are actually admiring our own reflection.
If all this is true, and my biases throb warmly when I detect pieces of myself, then why, on meeting the Skeptics, did I feel drawn to the defence of the homeopaths? What is the Rasputin trace that I sense in them, and in John Mack? I wonder if it has to do with the various madnesses that I once suffered. The delusional jealousy, the vandalism, the pathological drinking and theft. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that I was unhappy at school, that I made war with my teachers and that I had little in common with the kind of students who were good at science and mathematics. Am I, by instinct, with the irrationals? Are they my tribe? If so, that makes me an unreliable narrator. Which is not a good look for a journalist.
*
I am up on the balcony watching the three hundred assembled conventioneers enjoying a presentation about ghosts. A good proportion of them have come dressed in the white T-shirts that are being sold to promote tomorrow’s homeopathic overdose. An even larger number have screens of various sizes in their laps and are managing to be sceptical about ghosts while interacting fitfully with their illuminated computer-extensions.
I recognise one of the panellists. Professor Chris French, a former editor of the UK’s The Skeptic magazine and a professor of psychology who heads the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at the University of London. I once interviewed him, for the Financial Times.
The conventioneers laugh, as one, at a joke that French has made. I coldly survey the endless rows of chuckling white-shirted forms beneath me. There they are, I think. All the Skeptics, all gathered together, all thinking for themselves.
I have got to stop this.
I sit alone and try to rearrange my thoughts into something that resembles impartiality, but my biases are flexing madly. I am surprised, for a start, that so few of these disciples of empirical evidence seem to be familiar with the scientific literature on the subject that impassions them so. I am suspicious, too, about the real source of their rage. If they are motivated, as they frequently insist, by altruistic concern over the dangers of supernatural belief, why do they not obsess over jihadist Muslims, homophobic Christians or racist Jewish settlers? Why this focus on stage psychics, ghost-hunters and alt-med hippies? And isn’t the scene before me precisely the kind of thing that the Stanford Professor Philip Zimbardo warns against? The first two steps in his recipe for evil – assign yourself a role, and become a member of a group. ‘Groups can have powerful influences on individual behaviour,’ he said. Weren’t his doomed prison guards just like this: bonded by their fight, and their perceived superiority, in opposition to a common enemy?
One of the convention’s organisers, Michael ‘Marsh’ Marshall, arrives. Charismatic, confident and eloquent, the twenty-seven-year-old marketing executive in the crisply ironed shirt seems at ease both on stage addressing the conventioneers and on television news shows, on which he has recently been in demand on account of his campaign against the homeopaths.
Marsh’s journey into the movement began when he was a sixth-form student. ‘I used to do palm-readings,’ he tells me. ‘I was pretty good at it, but I didn’t believe it for a second. I just accidentally picked up some cold-reading techniques. It made me realise how easy it is to convince people of things that aren’t true – and to convince yourself. I’ve been interested in psychics ever since, because there’s a real harm in it. I had a reasonably well-documented tussle with a Liverpool psychic called Joe Power,’ he says, recalling it with a smile. ‘I went along to see him at one of his book signings and he didn’t take too kindly to me questioning him and saying, “Well, if you can really do what you’re saying then that’s fantastic. Just test it first. If it turns out you pass the test, we’re totally on board with you.”’ He shakes his head in amused disbelief. ‘He just went mental at me. He called me every name under the sun.’
Unlike the Skeptics I met last night, Marsh is familiar with a case in which homeopathy has been harmful – and appallingly so. He recounts the case of an Australian baby who was diagnosed with eczema aged four months and ended up dying five months later after her father, a homeopathy lecturer, insisted on treating her with his highly diluted potions. When her parents were imprisoned in 2009, the judge blamed the girl’s death on her father’s ‘arrogant approach’ to homeopathy.
‘I find cases like that really distressing,’ Marsh says. ‘Homeopathy is magic. That’s what we’re trying to get across with the overdose. We know we’re not going to convince the hardened believers. It’s the people who wander into Boots with a headache and say, “Homeopathy – I’ll try that” that we want to reach. To those people, we want to say, “There is no evidence for homeopathy. The science has been done. It simply doesn’t work.”’
I can’t help myself.
‘Have you read any of the studies?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ he says.
I sit up.
‘And understood them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which ones?’
A touch of irritation becomes evident around the edges of his eyes.
‘I can’t quote their names.’
I ask Marsh if there is a risk that, with activists gathering regularly to agree with each other that the ‘fringe sciences’ are scams and their practitioners fraudulent or deluded, that something important might get missed.
There is a famous quote by William James, who spoke of the scientific gains that can be made by paying attention to the ‘dust-cloud of exceptional observations’ that floats around ‘the accredited and orderly facts of every science.’ What if some young academic who is interested in an esoteric subject such as homeopathy or ESP is intimidated by the roar of the crowd into ignoring his vocation? Maybe, in among all this junk science, some crucial anomaly exists, the study of which could lead to a fantastic breakthrough? But now it won’t happen, because reason’s fightback is too fierce, too gloating, too much of a threat to a young scientist’s reputation. To be a Skeptic seems to involve signing up to a predetermined rainbow of unbeliefs. What if it slips into dogma?
‘By definition to be involved in scepticism, you’re someone who is critical of the world, is evaluating the world, and that in itself is a good inoculation against dogma,’ he says. ‘And anyway, decisions on that kind of stuff are not made on consensus or popularity, they’re made on evidence.’
It is, in other words, a restatement of his message to the psychic Joe Power. As soon as anyone proves homeopathy, mediumship or extrasensory perception, they will humbly admit that they have been wrong all along. The American rationalist-celebrity Rebecca Watson (another ex-magician who was inspired by James Randi) gives a typical definition of the Skeptic as one who is ‘willing to examine their beliefs and [is] always open to new evidence, [and has] the ability to hold a belief and, if new evidence comes in, to completely change your mind.’ This is why James Randi frequently rejects the title ‘debunker’, preferring
‘investigator’, and it is why, in the UK, there is a general preference for the American spelling, ‘Skeptic’: ‘“Sceptic” tends to get confused with cynic – de facto negativity,’ explains Marsh. ‘We like to emphasise that if stuff proves to be true, we’ll believe it.’
Later that day, one of the world’s most highly regarded sceptical activists will also claim a special immunity to dogmatic thinking on behalf of the warriors of science. Dr Steven Novella is a clinical neurologist from Yale University who presents the hit weekly podcast The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. ‘This is an intellectual community,’ Novella tells me. ‘The reason why scepticism is incompatible with dogma and ideology is; it’s very anti-dogmatic and anti-ideological at its core.’
I am startled to learn that Novella is so sceptical of homeopathy that he does not even accept its worth as an unusually sophisticated exercise in placebo theatre. He denies that placebo has any true physiological effect, insisting that it is purely psychological and that studies suggesting otherwise often fall victim to what is known as ‘The Hawthorne Effect’. ‘The act of participating in a clinical trial, of being observed, can make people feel better,’ he explains. ‘We have the data on this. People think they’re feeling better, but they’re not.’
The homeopaths themselves, says Novella, are a mix of the deluded and the knowingly fraudulent. ‘There’s always going to be a certain percentage of psychopathic con artists,’ he says. ‘In any system where people believe in magic, con artists smell that. It’s like blood in the water to them. That aside, there’s the people who are just profoundly naive. Then there are the promoters, like Dana Ullman [one of America’s most active defenders of homeopathy]. They’re really despicable because they get called out on the inaccuracy of the information they’re providing. Then the next time they come around, they’re peddling the same crap again.’
Before the day’s proceedings close, I see Professor Chris French alone behind a trestle table that is piled with issues of The Skeptic magazine. I wander up to him to say hello.
‘Oh, hi,’ he says pleasantly. ‘I really enjoyed your ghost book.’
‘Thanks!’ I say, beaming.
‘But I have to say, you’re not what I’d call a Skeptic.’
I sigh and wander off to spend the remainder of the day moseying in and out of talks. The final event of the evening is set by a sceptical musician from the US named George Hrab. As I leave the convention hall for bed, he is leading the crowd in a sing-along, the chorus of which goes: ‘You won’t believe what a Skeptic I am/I can’t believe you believe in that sham/We disagree but I still give a damn.’
And in the morning, I overdose.
*
‘Has everyone got the vial of pills we prepared for you?’ says Marsh, up on the stage. On each seat there is a small plastic container with a white screw-cap, each one holding a palmful of pills. ‘If you haven’t got any, there are helpers at the back of the room who have spare pills so, don’t worry, you will be able to overdose with us. In the time we’ve got before we’re going to attempt to kill ourselves I’m going to take you through what’s been happening over the last forty-eight hours.’
Marsh counts seventy cities in thirty countries across the world that are taking part in today’s overdose. Then he proudly introduces a special video recording that has been made for today. He turns towards the huge screen, grinning, and suddenly – there he is. Gazing down at the crowd with his bright grey eyes, pink ears, bald head and famous white wizard’s beard, it is the man Professor Chris French calls ‘the patron saint of the Skeptics.’
‘Hello,’ he says. ‘I’m James Randi.’
We watch in reverent silence as Randi talks of the times that he has overdosed in order to show that these ‘scam medications’ have no effect. ‘Every day, parents of sick children are coming home from their pharmacy with fake medicine, leaving their children in distress because these manufacturers and these stores don’t want consumers to know the truth,’ he says. ‘Every reputable study of these fake drugs has shown them to have no more effect than sugar pills.’
And then the moment arrives. The crowd shouts, ‘3, 2, 1, There’s nothing in it!’ And the sound of three hundred nerds crunching nothing fills the conference hall. Marsh happily surveys the room.
‘Is anyone dead yet?’
*
Skeptic after Skeptic at the Manchester conference told me the same thing. Despite mostly admitting they were unfamiliar with the scientific literature, they all confidently insisted, ‘There is no evidence for homeopathy.’ James Randi himself has said that ‘any definitive tests that have been done have been negative’. But this, I am subsequently informed, is not true. The website of the British Homeopathic Association notes 142 studies that have been published in ‘good quality’ journals of which just eight, it says, were negative. Meanwhile, Dr Alexander Tournier of the Homeopathy Research Institute – who became an adherent when he was studying quantum physics at Cambridge University – tells me, ‘If you talk to Skeptics they will acknowledge a paper that was published in the Lancet in 2005, which is known as “Shang et al.”. That included a hundred and ten respectable studies of homeopathy, many of which were positive. You can’t say that’s nothing.’
I discover all this with a sense of woozy betrayal. I had put my suspicion of the Skeptics down to my own unfair prejudices. I believed every word that they told me. My irritation has a strange effect, coating the little facts with layers of emotion, exaggerating the mild intellectual sleight-of-hand until it seems personal – a conspiracy of enemies misleading me, mocking me. I am reminded of the bickering UFO-spotters who hardened their positions the moment that they were challenged. I think, too, of John Mackay’s discovery of atheist propaganda in his textbook, and how this perceived mistreatment by ideologues threw him into the arms of the enemy. I know how he felt.
I decide to confess all to Andy Lewis, the author of the sceptical blog The Quackometer, who has agreed to guide me through some of the complex science that is involved in homeopathy. To my relief, he seems to understand. ‘Yes, many Skeptics can be pretty lazy and say, “There is no evidence,”’ he writes in an email. ‘A slightly better approach would be to say, “There is no good evidence.” I can understand how you might have felt slightly misled.’
One of the most remarkable attempts at finding laboratory proof that homeopathy works began with the dramatic events of June 1988. That was when the world’s most respected scientific journal, Nature, published a study that apparently demonstrated that water did, indeed, have a memory. The research team was led by a widely respected scientist, Dr Jacques Benveniste – a senior director of the French medical research organisation INSERM 200.
Benveniste was initially sceptical of homeopathy. ‘The first time I heard the word, I thought it was a sexual disease,’ he said, in a 1994 interview for BBC TV. He had been working on allergies for fourteen years, when one of his forty-strong team claimed to have seen that some cells in a blood sample had an allergic response to an allergen that had been heavily diluted.
‘I had the feeling of setting my foot in a completely unknown world,’ said Benveniste. ‘Something that was so strange that I couldn’t even envision what was going on.’
Fascinated, he instructed his best researcher, Dr Elisabeth Davenas, to investigate. The culmination of this work was his Nature paper which caused an international sensation, despite its being published with two unusual conditions: first, that Benveniste obtain prior confirmation of his results from other laboratories; second, that a team selected by Nature be allowed to investigate his laboratory following publication. Benveniste accepted these conditions; the results were reportedly replicated by four laboratories, in Milan, Italy; in Toronto, Canada; in Tel-Aviv, Israel; and in Marseille, France.
But the ‘editorial reservations’ scandalised Benveniste. He was enraged, arguing that in his view the team that was appointed to investigate him was not appropriately recruited. It was made up of the Nature editor
who had written the editorial, a fraud investigator and, of course, James Randi.
A replication was attempted. With everyone present, Dr Elisabeth Davenas – a homeopathy proponent who had interpreted all the original data – counted the number of cells that had been ‘degranulated’ by whatever agent it had been exposed to. At first, things looked good for Benveniste. When Davenas counted the blood that had been dosed with a homeopathic dilution and compared it with blood that had been treated with distilled water, the result was significant. But the investigators made Davenas assess the samples a second time – and this time, they weren’t labelled. When Davenas counted now, without knowing which was the homeopathic-treated blood and which was not, the test failed. It was almost as if she was operating under some powerful unconscious bias that was affecting her judgement. When the result was revealed, some of Benveniste’s scientists wept.
‘His whole team was playing a trick on itself,’ Nature’s editor, John Maddox, told the BBC. ‘They very rarely made these measurements blind, which meant that anyone who knew what he was looking for could bias his own counting to get the kind of answer he expected.’
Their report was published in Nature in July 1988, under the headline, ‘“High-dilution” experiments a delusion’. It was devastating. They complained at the fact that Benveniste’s lab was partially funded by a major homeopathy company and noted several potential flaws in his processes, while dismissing the claims of replication and describing homeopathy as a ‘folklore’ that ‘pervades’ Benveniste’s laboratory.
Benveniste fought back, deriding the Nature team’s ‘mockery of scientific inquiry’. He was outraged that they had allowed one negative result to ‘blot out five years of our work.’ He described the investigation as a ‘pantomime’ during which ‘a tornado of intense and constant suspicion, fear and psychological and intellectual pressure unfit for scientific work swept our lab.’ The team, he said, ‘imposed a deadly silence in the counting room, yet loud laughter was heard where he was filling chambers. There, during this critical process, was Randi playing tricks, distracting the technician in charge of its supervision.’ Benveniste finished his grand defence, also published in Nature, by saying, ‘Science flourishes only in freedom. We must not let, at any price, fear, blackmail, anonymous accusation, libel and deceit nest in our labs. Our colleagues are overwhelmingly utmost decent people, not criminals. To them, I say: never, but never, let anything like this happen – never let these people get in your lab.’