For the Love of Science

Okay, it is truly shocking to me that I have been writing this blog for over 6 months now and have yet to write a post like this, but here goes:

Mythbusters...we need to talk.

I have lost count of the number of people I have humored as they say that they find this show "entertaining, but come on, it's not real science." Yeah, you go ahead and think that.

Somewhere around, oh, 4th grade maybe, you are taught the Scientific Method (tm). According to the Scientific Method (tm), you follow several steps when conducting science:

1. Look at the shit we know.
2. Form a hypothesis about the shit we have yet to know.
3. Develop an experiment that, through the clever use of controls and isolation of said controls from all possible variables, will either confirm or disprove said hypothesis.
4. Oh, come on, you should know how this goes by now.
5. Look at the data.
6. Confirm, debunk, or revise the hypothesis.
7. Rinse and repeat.

What many people say about the Mythbusters is that they don't really follow the Scientific Method (tm). There are too many variables...not enough controls, they say. They haven't taken every possible occurrence into account, they say. They never conclusively prove or disprove anything, they say.

And they would be right.

But there's a dirty little secret that most of you non-science types haven't caught on to yet: The scientific community does the exact same thing. Every day. I have spent a fair amount of time doing actual, real research - not the profit-motivated, fine tuning kind of research done in industry, but academic research where the end goal is the acquisition of new, hopefully groundbreaking, Knowledge. In this world, we do not employ carefully, cleverly crafted hypotheses with a very specific goal in mind for every experiment...we throw a whole pile of crap at the wall and see what sticks. Oh, sure, we start with a goal in mind, but any advisor worth his salt knows that the most significant advances made in his lab are almost without fail a BYPRODUCT of whatever that student or postdoc was TRYING to do. Case in point: I went into my weekly meeting with my boss on Tuesday, armed with all sorts of movies and data. One of my movies demonstrated something we already knew - that the enzyme I was working with would inevitably be deposited on the surface of the device I was doing the reaction on. But, upon seeing this effect in action, his reponse wasn't, "Oh, shit, now we have proof that this is a problem" it was "WOW....what can we do with that???" Now, Isaac Asimov said the same thing slightly more eloquently:

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka' (I've found it) but 'That's funny...'"

Forget the Scientific Method (tm). THIS is how science is really done. Above all, and contrary to popular belief, it is an intensely creative endeavor. It is sloppy, it is ridiculous, it is inconvenient and rarely wraps itself up in tidy little packages. I am constantly amazed at how many people I meet that think that science and creative expression are mutually exclusive concepts, much as they believe that science and faith (or for that matter creativity and faith) are. This is why so many people find me an enigma, while from my perspective I make perfect sense (side note: I find that most people eventually come around to my logic - at least, anyone who matters).

Which brings me back to the Mythbusters. I am a fan of the way they do things - there are always holes in their methods, but that's science. It doesn't mean their conclusions are without merit - anyone that's ever had a paper or grant proposal reviewed knows all too well that even the most well-planned experiment can be shot full of so many holes it resembles a block of Emmentaler (mmm...cheese...) by the time you get it back. This is why we teach a whole lot more in the way of theories than we do laws. Relativity is a pretty fucking cool idea, and there's a lot of evidence out there to support it and darned little to refute it, but we don't know enough yet to say it's definitely true. Gravity, on the other hand...we're pretty sure about at this point. We've had a few hundred years to try to disprove the latter...only a hundred or so with the former, and when Einstein first came up with it we didn't really have the proper tools to test it for a few more decades. So it's still a work in progress.

But tonight, the Mythbusters were using methods that even I have to take issue with. They were testing the famous 5-second rule. (In the process, they also took advantage of their new-found bacterial culturing skills to test the whole your-mouth-is-dirtier-than-a-dog's notion. For those of you that are wondering, it's totally true. However, I am rather peeved that they neglected to mention that this has already been studied by actual scientists in laboratories, and the reason has nothing to do with the number of bacteria that find their way into the respective mouths via frequency of ass-lickings and garbage-scavenges, but rather the fact that dogs have a stronger anti-bacterial agent in their saliva than we do PRECISELY BECAUSE THEIR MOUTHS ARE EXPOSED TO MORE BACTERIA. Ain't nature grand?) So I won't get into all of the different ways in which they tried to determine whether the amount of time spent on the floor affects the number of bacteria transferred - to sum up: they tried a dry food and a wet food, different areas of a floor, straight transfer from the floor to the petri dish, etc. etc. Here are my problems with the way they went about it:

1. They tried to come up with a "uniformly dirty floor." I won't go into the specifics - it was fairly disgusting. My point being, there's still absolutely no guarantee that it was uniformly dirty - bacteria grow in groups, and some areas will most definitely be more dense in cell population than others, depending on any number of fairly random factors (floor topology, for example). Which would be corrected for if you wiped the food across a larger portion of said floor, but that messes with the whole 5-second rule stipulation that the food remain stationary. But there was absolutely no control done that showed that the floor tiles being used were, in fact, uniformly dirty.

2. They didn't specify how many duplicate trials they did. As an analytical chemist, reproducibility is everything, and things like this give me hissyfits. I believe they did duplicates, I just don't know how many, and while I realize this does not make for riveting TV, I really want to know because again, we're dealing with cell cultures, and any variations between trials will be grossly amplified.

3, and this is the big one: the big control experiment that they did to eliminate the wet/dry food factor was to bring the petri dish in direct contact with the floor for the specified periods of time (I believe they did 2 and 6 second trials). The result from this trial was, not surprisingly, that the dishes in each case picked up so many bacteria that the individual colonies merged on the plate, making it impossible to count them to get a data point. One surface covered in bacteria looks just like another surface covered in bacteria - if you can't fit any more in the space allotted, they stop reproducing. From this, they concluded that you cannot tell the difference between a 2-second exposure and a 6-second exposure. WRONG. JUST BECAUSE YOUR INSTRUMENT (in this case, YOU) CAN'T TELL THE DIFFERENCE DOESN'T MEAN THERE ISN'T ONE.

This is the point in the show where I stop speaking in actual words and start making pft! pfffttt! noises at the screen.

Adam and Jamie, I still adore you. But please, no more microbiology without a trained professional on board. Hell, a trained microbiologist would probably be appalled by what I consider good science. To each his own. But as long as you stick to trying to blow shit up by improbable means, we can probably make this work.

Oh, and before any of you smartasses try to read anything into the fact that my "For love of science" entry is so much longer than my "For love of God" entry...just know that while I feel I am knowledgeable enough to have an informed opinion about what science is, I have no such delusions when it comes to God. Plus, there may have been a couple of intervening glasses of wine to blame.