I am not a scientist. I don’t have any pretensions towards being a scientist. I did OK at school, but never followed that path. However, I do have a respect for science and scientists and (I hope) an appreciation of the scientific method.

What makes me despair is the general mistrust of scientists, almost as a matter of principle, amongst society at large. The only exception to this public mistrust of scientists seems to be a totally blind trust in any scientist who agrees with whatever someone thinks.

This despair is always bubbling under, but what brought it to the surface recently was this story about MRSA in last Saturday’s Guardian. The gist of it is that all the newspaper stories about MRSA found in samples taken from hospitals by undercover journalists appears to have been identified by the same laboratory. This laboratory is actually a one-man band of a company. The one man in question has no qualifications apart from a correspondence course PhD from a non-accredited place in the US. The laboratory itself is in the man’s garden shed. When his MRSA samples have been subsequently tested at ‘proper’ labs they were found to have no trace of MRSA.

The results of this ‘laboratory’s work formed the content of most (all?) newspaper stories about MRSA and therefore the reference point for any number of opinions amongst the general public. More worrying is that maybe even decisions taken by politicians could be affected either by the stories or the public perception of the stories.

The unsurprising part of the story is the reaction from the newspapers and the MRSA support group when the astounding lack of credibility of the soi disant expert was revealed. The Sunday Mirror said:

Health secretary John Reid was accused last night of trying to gag Britain’s leading expert on the killer bug MRSA

And the chairman of the MRSA support group said “it was an outrageous attempt to discredit and silence him.” Its funny how much benefit of the doubt can be given to someone who makes his money producing disinfectant and therefore has a vested interest in increasing fears of MRSA.

This example is particularly blatant, but you can see the same thing to a lesser extent in the arguments about mobile phone masts, MMR jabs and the same thing will happen if bird flu takes off, and it can be summarised as:

• Public opinion decides something is bad
• Scientists say that it isn’t as bad as everyone makes out
• Scientists’ arguments are dismissed on the justification of “well they would say that wouldn’t they?” with the strong implication that all scientists are always wrong
• One scientist publishes results which support the general point of view
• The public argument now has credibility because a scientist supports it…
• …and nobody finds that the least bit ironic.

The thing is I am not a scientist, as I started off by saying. I am not qualified to know what the relative risks and benefits are to MMR, GM crops, mobile phones, or whatever, although I can have an opinion or a gut-feeling. I have people to do that for me – they are people who didn’t give up science after their O levels, but carried on through A levels and university. I am realistic enough to expect that they probably know more science than me having spent at least 5 years more studying it, and they have access to all sorts of data and equipment I wouldn’t even understand.

It may be that on some subjects the majority of scientists are wrong and the public is right. If so, I would hope that when the scientists discover the proof of that they would change their opinion in the face of scientific proof.

Forget all the other aspects of the scientific method; for me the fundamental point is that most opinions on scientific theory should be held as a probability based on available data and if new data crops up which is contradictory then the theories and opinions should change to reflect that. Public opinion hardly ever seems to change just because an alternative proof comes along.

In all this, scientists are their own worst enemy – if they are true to their principles. If they have a theory which they are sure is correct, and have tried their best to disprove without managing to do so, but cannot absolutely prove it either, they might be certain something is true but cannot bring themselves to say so unless it is proved. They may be 99.999% sure of something but know that, by strict scientific criteria that still means it is an unproved theory. How can they be expected to get represented in the media, which will not even accept 100% proof if it disagrees with its preconceptions?

In all of this when I say ‘public opinion’ I mean, of course, what the newspapers have decided we should think and have manipulated us to think.

After all that, I don’t put absolute faith in what a scientist say purely because he is an expert, even if what he is saying is something I like and agree with: I will still expect him to back up what he says with proof. The blind trust I referred to above which pressure groups place in anyone who agrees with them is, to my mind, worse than the dismissal of other opinions. (Held by people that you almost expect to have written on their business cards “so-called expert in xxxx” from the way they get treated)

Just don’t get me started on how this applies to the Intelligent Design’ argument!