scientific hoaxes and confusion

[gcguy]

I have been reading a few of the posts on the forum and I am starting to wonder about what "truths" there are about science and technology which are held as fact by the general public but infact are complete rubbish.
A few examples...

When I was at school a teacher told me that the Sahara desert was once a tropical rain forrest but the Romans cut down all the trees to make ships.

As a youngster I remember seeing a TV program about the mining of nugets of metallic ores from the seabed. Turns out it was the US navy laying the SOSUS network.

Crop circles....despite the fact that the bloke that started it all off coming clean in a documetary program, why do people still think they are from aliens?

Any more?

GCguy

[Peter Apps]

That you can put a squashed maggot into a GC-MS and by the time you walk the other end of the bench it has printed out what toxic seed was in your dead body's last meal.

The trouble is that the customers believe this is how it really works - and when they hear what I have to charge them for an analysis they think that I am ripping them off.

Peter

[GOM]

yes, CSI has a lot to answer for.

Regards,

Ralph

[Russ]

CSI World
(Sing to the tune of the Vogues "5 O'clock World")

In the lab every morning just to keep my job
Looking through a book by some man named Grob
Sounds of the GC pounding in my brain
As another run goes down the drain

Yeah, yeah

But it’s a CSI world and a VP calls
Says he needs some assays fast
Then he talks about a lab on TV where
They’re done in 30 seconds flat, yeah

[Noser222]

Once when we had product made for a clinical trial at a contract manufacturer, we later found out that cleaning for the prior product was not sufficient, and thus that molecule may be present in our product.

Now, the contract manufacturer would not tell us what this contaminant was, or even its molecular weight or properties, other than that it was a "small molecule".

Our president calls from England, where our clinical trial was about to start or be cancelled because of this possible contaminant, and says to just shoot some through the LC-MS and see if something is or is not there, by the next morning...this was about 4PM on a Friday. Obviously he thought that the LC-MS was like a tricorder on Star Trek.

[MikeD]

I may be unusual but I don't watch CSI. Anyway it reminds me that in the mid 1970s animal feed in Michigan was contaminated with polybrominated biphenyls. A farmer took samples to I think Purdue university, where PBBs were identified in a very impressive piece of detective work at the time. A drama documentary was made a few years later and the problem was how to show this analysis in a couple of minutes of film. They must have had a real working HP3350 LAS system on the set with lines of real LabBasic code scrolling down the screen of a real HP264x terminal. The only thing optically faked on the terminal screen was a couple of humps representing a PBB trace. I remember the actor playing the academic investigator pointing at a screen full of LabBasic code (not the chromatogram) saying something like "There it is - PBB".

[WK]

Changing the subject slightly my latest Chemistry World magazine tells me that the cold fusion technique is still being "investigated" by some academics. Has anyone got any stories or experiences of this?
I envisage the Californian lecturer from the UKs Fast Show working on it.
WK

[GOM]

"we took some ordinary tap( faucet) water and ....."

More seriously, it was an interesting article - this time with claimed reproducible effects for some sort of nuclear reaction going on.

see http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/ ... 030701.asp

[Bruce Hamilton]

Not really confusion, but a neat little local story. Two 14 year old schoolgirls did a science project measuring the Vitamin C content of a blackcurrent juice sold here ( Ribena ) using an iodine titration. They couldn't find even a fraction of the claimed amount, and found more sugar than Coke.

They thought they were doing the experiment wrong. They attempted to contact Glaxo Smith Kline to discuss, who didn't initially respond. Responding later, GSK apparently just told them they were wrong, without explaining why.

Further work confirmed the girls' result, so they went to the regulators, who also go stonewalled by GSK. In court, GSK got hit with a ~US$150,000 fine ( large for NZ ), and has already agreed to major actions in Australia to avoid a similar court case.

The judge was scathing of GSK's approach of not responding to the scientific questions from the 14 year old girls, and later the regulators, but instead relying on strident marketing assertions without even considering the girls' evidence.

GSK now claims they have performed some analyses, but their own analyses were inaccurate. No details were provided.

How very 21st century - don't worry about the facts, just spend more on marketing to solve the perception issues. Incidently, neither of the girls plans on a science career - sensible lasses.

Bruce Hamilton

[GOM]

That's a nice story - I've passed it on to a young student currently doing a Science Fair experiment.

Regards,

Ralph

[DR]

... LabBasic code scrolling down the screen of a real HP264x terminal. The only thing optically faked on the terminal screen was a couple of humps representing a PBB trace. I remember the actor playing the academic investigator pointing at a screen full of LabBasic code ...

:: shudders ::

When I started my current position, I learned to run LAS. In addition to the HP terminals w/ the buttons burned into the monitors and "stink jet" printers, we had one IBM PS-2 that was emulating a HP terminal. Then we got Windows 3.0 w/ Wordperfect 5.1 and Excel 3.0. I managed to import LAS data into WP and "cut the fat out" via a macro and then I imported and parsed it in Excel. I think I was the first one where I work to print calculations instead of using a calculator and pen to enter them into a notebook by hand. I still had to deal w/ LAS "What do you mean my run crapped out because of a paper jam on a different floor?!?" but I got away from writer's cramp.