Science and the media: 20 - 24 November

NOV 24, 2010

Charles Day

Steve Corneliussen’s topics for this holiday-shortened week:

A lengthy Science magazine letter calling for the science community to communicate much more forcefully about human-caused climate disruption,
a Washington Post article reporting on a possible innovation that could moot objections to airport body scanners,
a front-page New York Times feature article continuing that newspaper’s investigation of medical radiation, this time in dentistry,
and an Israeli newspaper’s brief profile of a physics project involving scientists from countries normally hostile to each other.

Advocating much stronger climate communication

In the lengthy 19 November Science magazine letter “Time to Take Action on Climate Communication, ” the climatologist Michael Mann and nine coauthors proclaim that at “this potentially critical moment for human civilization, it is imperative that people, organizations, and governments be given the resources they need to participate in constructive civic, commercial, and personal decision-making about climate change risks and solutions.”

The writers represent organizations including the Climate Solutions Project , the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography , and the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication .

The letter’s tone suggests an escalation in what has been called the climate street fight.

“Humankind has waffled and delayed for decades,” the writers declare, and “further delay risks serious consequences for people and the ecosystems on which we rely.” They charge that “existing institutions are not well suited” to the task of making informed decisions. So they call for “the science community to develop, implement, and sustain an independent initiative ... to actively and effectively share information about climate change risks and potential solutions.”

They ask for participation by “a full range of climate scientists, decision scientists, and communication professionals” and for help from “philanthropic funding institutions.” Citing a battery of references, they predict that “to address misperceptions” and “to counter misinformation and deception,” the science community “will have to overcome psychological and cultural barriers to learning and engagement.”

“Despite the politically contentious nature of climate change policy,” they write, “the initiative must be strictly nonpartisan. In the face of efforts to undermine public confidence in science, it must become a trusted broker of unbiased information for people on all sides of the issue.”

Innovation and the-airport body-scan furor

In 1961, Bill Wattenburg —scientist, engineer, innovator, and talk-show host—earned a Berkeley PhD in electrical engineering and nuclear physics.-

In 2006, according to the recent Washington Post article “Scientists Say They Have Solution to TSA Scanner Objections,” he and colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory foresaw that a new generation of backscatter full-body scanners would,-as-Wattenburg put it, cause people to “scream like hell because they’re taking the clothes off everybody."-

This week, news reporters and commentators have been discussing what Wattenburg and others devised: a simple way to modify scanner images so that they-distort-a person’s body profile something like the way a funhouse mirror does, while still accurately revealing security contraband.-Livermore applied for a patent in 2006.-

The Post article summarizes the idea, calling it-a possible “cheap and simple fix in the computer software of new airport scanners [that] could silence the uproar from travelers who object to the so-called virtual strip search.” The article also reports that Wattenburg “said he was rebuffed when he offered the concept to Department of Homeland Security officials four years ago."-

The article recaps the overall controversy—not that anybody at this point lacks information about the furor—and quotes Wattenburg extensively. For example:-

There is absolutely nothing that they would lose in terms of the imagery by using this....-It’s probably a few weeks’ modification of the program.-It’s like changing the video card in your computer. They just strip out all the coding and put the very simple algorithm in. You could teach a kid how to do it....-[Government officials] are so far down the road in buying all the equipment that they’re too embarrassed to reverse course.-Their very sophisticated equipment can be made to do this.

Medical physics returns to New York Times front page

The 23 November New York Times continues Walt Bogdanich’s Radiation Boom series with the long feature article “Radiation Worries for Children in Dentists’ Chairs.”

The Times explains that articles in the series “examine issues arising from the increasing use of medical radiation and the new technologies that deliver it.” The article that opened the series , “Radiation Offers New Cures, and Ways to Do Harm,” appeared on the 24 January 2010 front page. The Times‘s blurb about that article gives a sense of the approach and tone: “While new technology saves the lives of countless cancer patients, errors can lead to unspeakable pain and death.”

This time, working with another reporter called Jo Craven McGinty, Bogdanich begins this way:

Because children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable to radiation, doctors three years ago mounted a national campaign to protect them by reducing diagnostic radiation to only those levels seen as absolutely necessary.

It is a message that has resonated in many clinics and hospitals. Yet there is one busy place where it has not: the dental office.

Not only do most dentists continue to use outmoded X-ray film requiring higher amounts of radiation, but orthodontists and other specialists are embracing a new scanning device that emits significantly more radiation than conventional methods, an examination by the New York Times has found.

Designed for dental offices, the device, called a cone-beam CT scanner, provides brilliant 3-D images of teeth, roots, jaw and even skull. This technology, its promoters say, is a safe way for orthodontists and oral surgeons to work with more precision and to identify problems that otherwise might go unnoticed.

But there is little independent research to validate these claims. Instead, the cone beam’s popularity has been fueled in part by misinformation about its safety and efficacy, some of it coming from dentists paid or sponsored by manufacturers to give speeches, seminars and continuing education classes, as well as by industry-sponsored magazines and conferences, according to records and dozens of interviews with dentists and researchers.

The reporters go on to implicate the Journal of the American Dental Association for allowing “one of the leading cone-beam manufacturers, Imaging Sciences International, to underwrite an issue devoted entirely to cone-beam technology,” with the magazine reaching 150 000 dentists and containing “a favorable article by an author who has equated a cone-beam CT with an airport scan"—when in fact “a cone beam can produce hundreds of times more radiation,” according to “experts.”

The reporters discuss “alarms about ... indiscriminate use” and charge that without enough “guidelines or regulations, well-meaning orthodontists and other specialists are turning to a new technology they do not fully understand [and] putting patients at risk, particularly younger ones.”

A problem, the reporters say, comes not from single scans but from multiple scans that increase lifetime risk. They report that according to “one industry estimate, more than 3000 scanners and about 30 different models have been sold, at prices up to $250 000,” with dentists—"some of whom charge several hundred dollars per scan"—profiting “by owning their own machines.”

In a passage that got my attention—since I’m old enough to remember using shoe-store x rays—the reporters write that “Dr. Allan G. Farman, president of the American Academy of Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology, cautions doctors not to become overly enamored of the new technology, citing the example of how shoe stores once took X-rays of customers’ feet to see if shoes fit.” They quote Farman: “At least the shoe merchants were ignorant of the effects of radiation.”

The reporters describe the pervasiveness of the marketing of cone-beam CT scanners at the annual conference of the American Dental Association, where “six manufacturers spent nearly $290 000 to promote 3-D technology.”

To show the pervasiveness of the enthusiasm, they quote dentists’ views:

Dr. Steven A. Guttenberg of Washington, DC, said he uses the scanner “for every single implant that I do.”
Dr. Rik Vanooteghem of Sunnyvale, California, added: “I really feel blindfolded if I don’t use it.”
Dr. Bradford Edgren of Greeley, Colorado, said his scanner had found hidden teeth—among other things. “I found a rock in one child’s ear,” Dr. Edgren said. “Now she can hear and her grades have gone up.”

And they report that a “California lawyer, Arthur W. Curley, suggested that dentists might even face legal liability for not using 3-D imaging.”

Then the reporters add this: “Mr. Curley, along with Drs. Vanooteghem, Guttenberg, and Edgren, share more than their enthusiasm. They have all received speaking fees from Imaging Sciences.”

Continuing on their theme of mildly implying mild corruption, the reporters also offer this anecdote:

On Nov. 10, more than 100 members of the Greater Philadelphia Society of Orthodontists met in the august, dark-paneled rooms of the Union League of Philadelphia.

They had come to hear Dr. James Mah, described by the society as one of the world’s foremost experts on 3-D technology, and to earn six continuing education credits. Dr. Mah, an associate clinical professor at University of Southern California and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, “has made over 100 presentations nationally and internationally,” according to his biography from a recent conference.

When a Times reporter showed up for the lecture, a representative of the society welcomed the coverage. But after the representative said he needed to consult a “vendor representative,” society officials reversed course. Because actual cases were to be discussed, the officials said, the reporter’s presence would violate federal patient privacy laws. Dr. Mah declined to be interviewed, and the reporter was escorted off the premises by security personnel.

This quite lengthy article contains much more along the lines traced out in this media report. It ends with an anecdote about a professional dental article—an anecdote leading to one final punch line: “The article’s praise was hardly surprising. According to the publisher, Imaging Sciences wrote it.”

Middle East’s light source and the Republic of Science

In 1809, in what historians have come to call the “Republic of Science” letter, Thomas Jefferson spoke of “the nature of the correspondence which is carried on between societies instituted for the benevolent purpose of communicating to all parts of the world whatever useful is discovered in any one of them.”

He continued, “These societies are always in peace, however their nations may be at war. Like the republic of letters, they form a great fraternity spreading over the whole earth, and their correspondence is never interrupted by any civilized nation.”

It’s true that the UNESCO-sponsored SESAME project—Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East—seeks to do far more than just share scientific information. But it operates on the principle Jefferson praised. Consider this headline and standfirst from a recent article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: “Israel and Iran unlikely partners in physics project: The two strange bedfellows sit side by side at particle accelerator parley, vow funding for cutting-edge venture.”

The article opens this way:

Representatives of Israel, Iran, the United States and a host of Muslim and European countries met last week near the Dead Sea in Jordan to discuss the completion of an advanced particle accelerator just 30 kilometers from Israel. If completed, the accelerator will mark the culmination of 15 years of cooperation between unlikely scientific allies.

Representatives of Turkey, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, and Bahrain also attended. In the 1-MB low-resolution version of a November 2010 brochure , SESAME calls itself “An international centre for research and advanced technology under the auspices of UNESCO.”

Christopher Llewellyn-Smith presides over the SESAME Council. In “republic of science” terms, that’s a fitting choice, since he’s a former director general of the international accelerator laboratory CERN.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the Media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.