I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That

by Ben Goldacre

  In The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, the hero shoots himself because his love is unattainable. The novel was banned after young men throughout Europe were reported to be dressing like Werther, copying his affectations, and taking their own lives in the same style.

  But a myth about a book is not enough: you need research. And it has been shown repeatedly that suicide increases in the month after a front-page suicide story. There is also evidence that the effect is bigger for famous people and gruesome attempts. You may want to remember that fact for later.

  Details matter, as ever. Overdoses increased by 17 per cent in the week after a prominent overdose on Casualty (watched by 22 per cent of the British population at the time), and paracetamol overdoses went up by more than others. In 1998 the Hong Kong media reported heavily on a case of carbon-monoxide poisoning by a very specific method, using a charcoal burner. In the ten months preceding the reports, there had been no such suicides. In the following month, November, there were three; then in December there were ten; and over the next year there were forty. You may want to remember that story for later.

  It’s not pie in the sky to suggest that the media should be careful about how they discuss suicide. After the introduction of media reporting guidelines in Austria, for example, there was a significant decrease in the number of people throwing themselves under trains.

  So organisations like the Samaritans take this seriously. They suggest that journalists avoid crass phrases like ‘a “successful” suicide attempt’. They suggest that journalists avoid explicit or technical details of suicide methods, for reasons you can now understand. They suggest that journalists include details of sources for help and advice, since an article about suicide represents a great opportunity to target people who are at risk with useful information. And they recommend avoiding simplistic explanations for suicide.

  From the weekly mass of reports that trample on this perfectly good common sense, one article from the Telegraph at the tail end of last year particularly sticks in my memory. It is very different from the coverage of Sylvia Plath’s son, and you might have missed it.

  ‘Man Cut Off Own Head with Chainsaw’ was the headline: ‘A man cut off his head with a chainsaw because he did not want to leave his repossessed home.’ What followed this headline was not a news story: far from it. What the Telegraph published was a horrific, comprehensive, explicit and detailed instruction manual.

  In fact this information was so appallingly technical and instructive that after some discussion it has been decided that the Guardian will not print it, even in the context of a criticism. It gives staggering details on exactly what to buy, how to rig it up, how to use it, and even how to make things more comfortable while waiting for death to come. Suicidal thoughts are common. They pass.

  Journalists get these kinds of stories from coroners’ inquests, which are open to the public because we decided as a community, centuries ago, that it was important to be transparent about the judicial process.

  Perhaps Sylvia Plath’s son will have a public inquest. Perhaps the media will cover it in the same way that the Telegraph covered the tragic case of Mr Phyall. I doubt they will, and I very much hope they won’t. It’s just hard to tell which is the journalists’ true voice: the caring, compassionate, informed consolation; or the murderously detailed chainsaw voyeurism.

  Roger Coghill and the Aids Test

  Guardian, 28 June 2008

  It’s the big stories I enjoy the most. ‘Suicides “linked to phone masts”’, roared the Sunday Express front-page headline this week. ‘The spate of deaths among young people in Britain’s suicide capital could be linked to radio waves from dozens of mobile phone transmitter masts near the victims’ homes.’

  Who is raising these concerns? ‘Dr Roger Coghill, who sits on a government advisory committee on mobile radiation, has discovered that all 22 youngsters who have killed themselves in Bridgend, South Wales, over the past 18 months lived far closer than average to a mast … Masts are placed on average 800 metres away from each home across the country. In Bridgend the victims lived on average only 356 metres away.’

  These are extremely serious issues. Being generous, there is reasonable evidence of a possible link between power lines and childhood leukaemia, and we may not yet know the long-term physical risks posed by mobile phones to those who use them, since they haven’t been around too long.

  I contacted Dr Coghill, since his work is now a matter of great public concern: he will, quite naturally, want his evidence to be properly assessed. But Dr Coghill was unable to give me the data. No paper has been published. He himself would not describe the work as a ‘study’. There are no statistics presented on it, and I am not allowed to see the raw figures. In fact, Dr Coghill tells me he has lost the figures. This is a bit off.

  It also leads to obvious problems with interpretation: details are important, after all. He says the suicide rate was higher nearer mobile-phone masts: what was the control group he compared against? And how did he work out the average distance from a mast? Perhaps the average distance from a mast in any urban area is less than the average distance for the whole country, because masts tend to be clustered in urban areas, where the people are (like postboxes, or corner shops). Maybe densely populated poor areas with less political influence have more masts foisted upon them by planning committees, and maybe these poor areas also have more suicides.

  Or maybe Dr Coghill is on to something? Clusters on maps have been the beginning of several interesting stories in epidemiology, including John Snow’s discovering, in 1854, that the Broad Street pump was responsible for the Soho cholera outbreak. I asked Dr Coghill which ‘averages’ he meant. But he would not tell me.

  Who is Dr Coghill? He says he doesn’t have a doctorate, and that the Express made a mistake. Does he ‘sit on a government advisory committee on mobile radiation’? Sort of. Mr Coghill participates in something called SAGE, a ‘stakeholder’ group which discusses power cables (not mobile phones) and is run at the request of the Department of Health by RK Partnerships Ltd, a company that specialises in mediation, facilitation and conflict resolution. People who campaign about things are rightly invited onto consultation panels run by the government, so that their concerns can be heard. I’m not sure if that makes them government advisers.

  As an example of the kind of discussion you might find at SAGE, here is Mr Coghill’s contribution to their last document, in the section where people who disagree with the group can state their own views: ‘Whilst this first interim assessment is a welcome step, it contains three important omissions … the powerfully electro-protective effect of exogenous melatonin supplementation, particularly among the UK’s 20 million elderly population, and the adverse effects of EMFs on melatonin synthesis within the body have not been addressed.’ Mr Coghill recently received £125,000 of angel investment for his business selling a range of melatonin pills called Asphalia.

  Readers worried by the front-page story on Mr Coghill’s inaccessible research may have visited his website for more information. There they could buy his electromagnetic field protection equipment at competitive prices, and a £149 device called the Acousticom for ‘finding out if your home is being exposed to microwaves from e.g. cellphone masts’, as well as several other interesting products, including a magnet that makes wine taste nicer, and the ‘Mood Maker’ treatment for impotence at just £22.32 including VAT (‘The small unit discreetly attaches to your underwear … the Mood Maker will gently and gradually increase circulation in the pelvic area’). You might also enjoy his books, including Electrohealing, ‘using electric and magnetic fields for alleviative and curative ends’, and of course Atlantis, ‘a new look at the Plato legend with a grim conclusion re global warming and ozone depletion’.

  Lastly, regular readers will know that someone’s ability to police their own enthusiasm can often be assessed using something called ‘the Aids test’. Here is the Express’s front-page expert Mr Coghill on Aids: ‘The idea that Aids
is caused by a virus is a well-protected fiction.’ Is there another cause? ‘The possibility that immune deficits … can be acquired through over-exposure to non-ionising electromagnetic fields is, however, real, and proven in the laboratory.’

  Because, remarkably, suicide is not the first problem Mr Coghill has attributed to electromagnetic waves, and he built his earlier hypothesis on the same evidence as his current one: ‘Aids cases seemed to correspond closely to the numbers of RF, VHF, and UHF station densities.’ Mr Coghill discovered that eleven of the twelve cities in America with the highest incidence of Aids also had the highest level of electromagnetic activity. A disease of dense urban areas, perhaps? He even had some exciting ideas about treatment: ‘One first step might be to demagnetise the haem [sic] in an attempt to improve the signal to noise ratio of the immune signal …’

  We should be glad that there are individuals out there with esoteric views. We should respect and admire their tenacity and self-belief, if not their ability to provide us with actual data. But we probably don’t need to put them on the front page of a national newspaper.

  BRAINIAC

  Ka-Boom! Science! COOL!!?!

  Guardian, 22 July 2006

  The new series of Sky TV’s hit science programme Brainiac starts tomorrow, and there’s just one question on everyone’s lips: will they be faking the science as much in this series as they have previously?

  At badscience.net you can find a very interesting clip from series two of Brainiac. It claims to show a lump of rubidium, and then a lump of caesium, each blowing up a bathtub: ‘Whether you’ve left school, or you’re still at school, you can still appreciate the sheer MAYHEM that chemistry can be!!!’ the presenter explains. ‘Bunsen burners! Mixing chemicals!’ Science!!! ‘Now, you may have been allowed to mix very small amounts of lithium with water.’ Yes. ‘You may, with a responsible adult, have mixed H2O with sodium. And you may, under strict “scientific” control, have witnessed potassium mixed with water. But the odds are, if you have’ – he reaches for a prop – ‘it will only have been on those … rubbish science videos!’ A box labelled ‘Rubbish Science Video’ is then burned on a Bunsen burner, using some big sciencey tongs.

  Brainiac’s much better than those boring science videos.

  Then we get to the action. ‘These next two are the dog’s nuts of the periodic table,’ he goes on, introducing rubidium and caesium. ‘Mix these two with water, stand back … and watch the MAYHEM!!!’ In the programme they are explicit about what they are doing. ‘Caesium, the emperor of alkali metals, particularly nasty, could go off at any time!’ ‘What’s that going to do when it hits the water?’ ‘Imagine a depth charge in a bathtub!’

  That’s exactly what I’m looking at. I can see the black wire, connected to the detonator.

  ‘As our caesium sinks in the water, the rapid generation of hydrogen gas should produce quite an explosion!!!’ They drop the caesium in, and run for cover. ‘And it does!’ The bathtub is blown to pieces. ‘Yeeeeeesssss!’ gasps the presenter. ‘Only on Brainiac do you get that kind of … science!’ The dance music stops.

  But what really happened? I have a Deep Throat: Brainiac’s ‘Dr Bunhead’, also known as Tom Pringle. He says: ‘Absolutely bloody nothing. The density of caesium ensured it hit the bottom of the bath like a lead weight. The sheer volume of water then totally drowned out the thermal shock-wave I was expecting to shatter the bath. This was an expensive filming day. They had hired part of Pinewood studios and had an ambulance and fire engine plus crew on standby. They could not go home empty-handed. So they rigged a bomb in the bottom of the bath (you really can see the black wire leading into the bath, if you watch the show again) and then blew the shit out of it. I must say, it did look cool, [but it] ate away at my conscience … I couldn’t do anything about it.’

  If this was all faked, then what’s the point? Or rather, why do they make such a fuss about how they’re really doing science, and saying ‘the rapid generation of hydrogen gas’ caused the explosion, if it didn’t? Anyway, a Sky spokesperson said: ‘All of the experiments conducted on Brainiac have proven theory behind them. We aim to inform, excite and, above all, entertain our viewers with science method conducted in a fun and engaging way. We love big bangs and sometimes we’ll make an explosion bigger than we need to just because it’s fun but we always tell our viewers. We’re just about to start our fourth series, we’ve won several awards as well as the respect of educational professionals and we’re really proud to be sparking children’s interest in science.’ Sky say they tell people when experiments are souped up. They were unable to tell me if this experiment was faked or not (it was), and unable to confirm if viewers were told if it was faked (they weren’t).

  Who’s the Daddy?

  Guardian, 22 July 2006

  So Theodore Gray bought a kilo and a half of pure sodium metal on eBay. At school, you probably dropped a crumb of it into water – or rather, you watched your chemistry teacher do that – and the sodium reacted with the water to produce sodium hydroxide (a nasty alkali) and some hydrogen gas. The reaction gave off lots of heat, which ignited the hydrogen, and so the little lump of sodium fizzed across the water with a nice flame.

  Theodore Gray got some friends over, with refreshment, and launched a kilo of sodium into his private lake.

  His reasoning was sound: if he tipped in some hydrochloric acid afterwards (‘Muriatic acid at any hardware store’), this would neutralise the sodium hydroxide, and the pond would be a little saltier. There’s no law against making slightly salty water.

  That’s not quite how things worked out. After an initial large explosion from the first chunk, a series of secondary explosions occurred, producing one fairly large wedge that began hopping across the lake. It was thrown forty feet up into the air, then flew into the water at high speed, only to be thrown back into the air by the resulting explosion. It only takes a few of these skips to get several hundred feet in a few seconds. The partygoers were two hundred feet away, and ran for cover.

  Now, you might be asking: where’s the bad science? Well: Sky’s popular flagship science programme has just started its new series. Last week I accused them of faking content. They tried to make me nervous about it. Now they’ve admitted that they definitely did fake those explosions. And they have also admitted that viewers were not told (or as they said last week: ‘but we always tell our viewers’). And they have admitted that they fake other stuff. In fact, they were so blasé about this that at one point they were even going to give me a list of other examples, but now they’ve changed their mind about that.

  Here’s where it gets really elaborate: they don’t tell you explicitly that they fake stuff, but they now say that you are a fool not to assume that they fake their experiments: ‘The clue is in the title of the show, “Brainiac Science Abuse”, it’s an entertainment programme, it’s being made for an entertainment channel, it’s to be expected from the show.’

  But it’s not. This is a programme that repeatedly tells viewers how reckless and dangerous and science it is – in a way that now feels slightly defensive. Now Brainiac claim they actually said ‘This is what happens if you stick rubidium in a bath,’ and then showed ‘a demonstration of what would happen’ (that’s just not true: it was a generic special effects explosion, and they said – repeatedly – that they were doing it for real). ‘We may as well have done it,’ they say: which is an interesting approach to science. But of course, they did do it: their scientific adviser dropped these metals into their bath, on camera, and unfortunately the bath didn’t blow up. That’s life. You can’t say that this ‘not exploding’ was somehow ‘wrong’, and that the fake explosions they broadcast were what ‘should’ have happened. What should have happened, when you drop the rubidium in the water, is exactly what did happen: not a lot.

  Despite the fakery, of course, Brainiac gets massive ratings, and is praised in very high places for popularising science. So to me, this is a lot like the nutritionist question:
Is it OK to lie to people about science, if it makes them eat vegetables? But more than that, it’s a question of who do you want to be your friend: the faker, who desperately insists he’s doing dangerous science, while setting off weak, staged, plastic explosions; or Theodore Gray, who buys a kilo and a half of sodium on the internet, and gets some friends over for a party, to chuck it in the lake?1

  STUFF

  Here’s My … Foreword to the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway Guidebook

  20 December 2013

  I often tweet about my love for the RH&D narrow gauge railway, and this year they asked me to write an introduction for their guidebook. Some of the staff were worried by what I sent. But they were wrong. I love this railway.

  The Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway has a strange, dreamlike existence, on the border between fantasy and reality. You leave Toytown in a cute miniature train, surrounded by excited children. But Disney this is not. Suddenly you’re riding through real life: past clothes lines, collapsing breezeblock walls, an abandoned washing machine in a back garden, chuffing along behind a miniature steam train. Finally, you’re ferried across a beautiful, windswept shingle peninsula, spotted with railway-carriage houses and abandoned shipping containers. Then you are delivered to the foot of a nuclear power station.

  When I mentioned that huge, monolithic nuclear installation to the editor of this guidebook, he replied: ‘Do you know, I barely notice it these days.’ The two reactors are at least a hundred metres tall, humbling and majestic, on a 225-acre site. Nobody should ever play them down, and it’s fun to explore the perimeter.

  This meeting of toy train sets and grim industrial purpose is what makes the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway so perfect. Toytown trains in amusement parks are annoying. Proper narrow-gauge railways have a history. When you stop being a child, and start herding children yourself, you notice the chinks in playtime. Now, when I see kids chasing each other through a carriage – on a rebuilt Welsh mining railway, say – I think: this dragged people to hard jobs, in dark pits, that most people today could barely imagine.