When you read a news story on some scientific finding, you are typically reading an account that is based on a press release issued by a college or university, typically a press release issued about the same time the scientific paper is published. Some web sites simply publish such university or college press releases word-for-word; others have stories that are based on such press releases. What very often happens is that the college or university press release will exaggerate or over-dramatize the scientific research it describes. Often much of what you will read in the press release is just plain false. University press releases very often contain false claims and false ideas written largely to fool you into thinking something very important work was done when no such thing happened.
Why would such a thing occur? It occurs because the college or university has a motive to present itself as a place where important research is occurring. If a university issues a press release entitled, “We Funded This Research, But It Didn't Find Anything,” then such a story is not one that can be used on the university's web site to help attract student enrollments and donors. But if the same research is described with a press release entitled something, “Fascinating New Research Sheds Light on the Origin of Life,” or something along those lines, then such a press release has some value in helping to uphold or build the university's reputation or prestige.
The scientists who wrote some scientific paper could step in and stop the university press office from producing misleading press releases about the research the scientists did. But such scientists rarely do that. It's kind of a "wink and a nod" situation, in which scientists tolerate misleading press releases about their research. Part of the reason for such toleration is that scientists are judged by two numbers: the number of papers they write that get published, and the number of citations such papers get. The more hype and misleading sensationalism that goes on in press releases about some research, the more citations such research will tend to get. So scientists have a motive to "look the other way" when misleading "carnival barker" press releases are issued.
Besides the fact that they are written by people who are encouraged to sensationalize and make unimportant research sound important, a very major reason why errors are so common in university press releases is that they are often written by people who have little or no understanding of the very deep and very complex topics that are being discussed. For example, a press release written about the origin of life or the nature of memory may be written by some university press office copy writer with a BA in communications, someone who has no understanding of the incredibly deep and complex scientific issues involved in such topics.
We can tell from some web pages how university press release copywriters are being encouraged to sensationalize scientific research:
- A National Institute of Health page entitled "Crafting a Science News Release" tells you to "be more than excited," "think in soundbites," and write in a way that "frames the science in a captivating way," giving us an example of some quote that uses the phrase "unprecedented understanding."
- Another page describing how to write a scientific press release gives us a template in which the suggested first sentence is a claim that "the scientific community is excited by..." the research described.
- A page entitled "Seven Guidelines for Writing a Scientific Press Release" gives as one of its seven guidelines "Make the headline super-compelling."
- Another page gives us this template for writing a scientific press release:
"Scientists today announced that they are the first to successfully demonstrate SCIENTIFIC FINDING. This has long been
one of the holy grails of SCIENTIFIC FIELD. 'This finding radically alters our understanding of the field, to say the least,' says FIRST AUTHOR, a SCIENTIFIC FIELDologist from INSTITUTION who led the research. 'We were stunned when we made the discovery. For a few minutes we just didn’t believe what we were seeing,' says FIRST
AUTHOR, 'then SECOND AUTHOR (a student of FIRST AUTHOR) yelled "We’ve done it!" and we started dancing
around the LAB/OBSERVATORY/FIELD SITE. It was very exciting.”
You get the idea? Just replace the capitalized phrases, and you have your phony "full of hype" carnival-barker press release.
The copy writers at university press offices love to write headlines with the same phrases. Some vague generic phrases such writers love to use are the phrases "shed light" or "casts light" or "yield new clues" or "gain insight." So one very popular headline template works like this:
Scientists Shed Light on [INSERT LONG-STANDING PROBLEM]
Another popular template works like this:
Scientists Get New Clues About [INSERT LONG-STANDING PROBLEM]
Another popular template works like this:
Scientists Gain Insight on [INSERT LONG-STANDING PROBLEM]
So we have endless science press releases with headlines such as this:
Scientists Shed Light on the Origin of Life
Scientists Cast Light on How Memories Form
New Study Yields Insight on Why People Age
Scientists Shed Light on How Man Appeared
New Study Casts Light on the Origin of Consciousness
Scientists Gain Insight on Why Husbands Cheat
New Study Yields New Clues About the Fermi Paradox
Scientists Get New Clues on Cause of Autism
In most cases, the headline using such phrases is misleading.. Typically the research discussed is something that did nothing at all to shed light on the long-standing problem mentioned, and did nothing to provide new clues about such a problem, and did nothing at all to yield insight on the problem.
An example of a university press-release using one of these headline conventions in a very misleading manner is a press release entitled "Research Team's Study Provides New Insights into How Brain Forms and Stores Long-Term Memory." The headline is incorrect. It refers to a paper that did not study memory, but merely studied part of the brain anatomy of rats. The paper is entitled "Hippocampal-medial entorhinal circuit is differently organized along the dorsoventral axis in rodents." The paper confesses it merely speculated. We read this:
"Although we hypothesize that the ventral hippocampus might strongly influence the signal flow in hippocampal-MEC-neocortical circuits to facilitate long-term memory formation and storage, we did not explore this in vivo. It will be important for future studies to investigate this hypothesis by manipulating the activity of the ventral hippocampal-MEC circuit during/following a memory task and analyzing the resulting effects on memory consolidation."
Of course, the phrase "provides new insights" is more compelling in a press release than "makes a guess."
Let us look at another example of a press-release using one of these headline conventions: a recent press release from Johns Hopkins University entitled "ANCIENT PROTEINS OFFER NEW CLUES ABOUT ORIGINS OF LIFE ON EARTH."
The headline is incorrect. The research did not involve any investigation of ancient proteins. It is almost impossible to study ancient proteins, because almost all proteins are short-lived molecules. Involving novel combinations of chemicals artificially produced by high-tech equipment in a lab, the research did not produce any proteins at all. All it produced were much simpler chemicals called peptides.
Most protein molecules in the human body consist of several hundreds of amino acids with a special arrangement needed to produce some particular functional or structural result. When you have a small number of amino acids linked together, that is called a peptide. All the researchers did was to join together some amino acids in a laboratory to make peptides. The press release makes this untrue claim: "In the lab, the researchers mimicked primordial protein synthesis of 4 billion years ago by using an alternative set of amino acids that were highly abundant before life arose on Earth." No, the researchers did not mimic "primordial protein synthesis of 4 billion years ago," because (1) they did not produce any proteins; (2) they did not run any experiment simulating early Earth conditions, but merely played around with chemicals using high-tech equipment in a modern laboratory setting. The scientists' paper (which can be read here) makes no claim to have produced a protein.
The subtitle of the press release is wrong, claiming "scientists gain insights into how amino acids shaped the genetic code of ancient microorganisms." The genetic code is a symbolic system used by life in which certain combinations of nucleotide base pairs represent particular amino acids. Amino acids did not shape the genetic code, the origin of which scientists are utterly unable to explain. Science literature is full of inappropriate claims that some chemical "shaped," "formed" or "guided" some other biological reality way too complex to be explained in such a simplistic way.
The very first phrase of the body of the press release is a misstatement claiming that the researchers were "simulating early Earth conditions in the lab." No, according to their paper, they used a Spyder Mark IV peptide synthesizer. A photo of a Spyder peptide synthesizer is shown below, from the page here. A peptide synthesizer like the one shown is a piece of fancy high-tech equipment that uses a centrifuge, a wheel-like device spinning at very high speeds. When you use such high-tech equipment, you are not simulating early Earth conditions, where no such super-fast spinning could have occurred.
We have a quote with an extremely misleading statement by a scientist:
" ' Protein folding was basically allowing us to do evolution before there was even life on our planet,' Fried said. 'You could have evolution before you had biology, you could have natural selection for the chemicals that are useful for life even before there was DNA.' "
You should be skeptical when a scientist uses the word "basically," which is often a clue that you are being misled. Scientists do not believe that either evolution or proteins existed before there was life on planet Earth, contrary to what Fried is claiming. The term "natural selection" is a not-literally-accurate term scientists use for something that they claim to be going on only in populations of living organisms. It is very misleading to be using either the term "evolution" or "natural selection" to describe something merely involving dead chemicals, before life existed.
Later in the press release, Fried gives us another misleading claim, by claiming, "The universe seems to love amino acids," which the press release reiterates by suggesting that amino acids "are ubiquitous in other corners of the universe." To the contrary, none of the twenty amino acids used by living things has been discovered in space, other than the three simplest amino acids, glycine, valine and alanine. The claimed detections of glycine, valine and alanine are merely "tiniest trace amount" things that are rather dubious, and we cannot be sure that such things were really found.
The only claims of detecting an amino acid on another planet or moon is a dubious claim of detecting the simplest amino acid (glycine) in a very tiny trace amount (1 part in a billion) in the atmosphere of Venus. Made by one paper, the claim has not been replicated by another paper. Since a claim recently of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus in the trace amount of 20 parts per billion was disputed by several other scientific papers (here, here and here), we can have little confidence in the claim of a much smaller 1 part per billion abundance of glycine in the atmosphere of Venus. No amino acids or sugars have been found on Mars or on Saturn's large moon Titan (where about 20 other chemicals have been detected) or an Enceladus (another large moon of Saturn where some chemicals have been detected, but not amino acids or sugars). A claim has been made that some amino acids existed in a meteorite (Nakhla) reputed to have come from Mars, but the paper making that claim says, "The amino acids in Nakhla appear to be derived from terrestrial organic matter that infiltrated the meteorite soon after its fall to Earth." One paper claimed to have found glycine, alanine and valine in a sample from the asteroid Ryugu, but the abundances found were negligible, only about one nanomole per gram, way, way too small to be seen with the naked eye. This is an abundance of about 1 part per billion. A NASA press release notes that no sugars or nucleobases were found, meaning none of the building blocks of DNA or RNA were found. The NASA press release follows a typical trick of such releases, saying the sample from the asteroid was "organic-rich," failing to explain that by "organic molecules" it means any molecule with carbon. 99.999999% of these molecules are not components of living things.
Scientists keep giving us misleading ideas that amino acids are common in outer space because they want us to think there would have been plenty of amino acids around to make an accidental origin of life easier. Such scientists like to avoid telling us the truth on this topic, that 17 of the 20 amino acids used by living things have never been detected outside our planet, and that the other three amino acids have only been reported in negligible amounts like 1 part in a billion (1 part in 1,000,000,000).
Elsewhere in the press release, Fried contradicts his earlier statement about evolution before life, and states this: "To have evolution in the Darwinian sense, you need to have this whole sophisticated way of turning genetic molecules like DNA and RNA into proteins." Containing no amino acids, DNA and RNA do not turn into proteins. Proteins are made from amino acids, not nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA.
The research discussed by the press release has not actually given us any "new clues" about the origin of life, but the press release did give us several thick slices of baloney. In this sense it resembled the majority of press releases on the topic of the origin of life, a topic on which scientists and science writers have been badly misinforming us about for many decades.
Another trick of science press release writers is to claim that something new and important was discovered, no matter how dubious the claim may be, and no matter how old the alleged discovery is. A ridiculous example occurred two days ago, with a science press release that used the "new clues" rhetoric, and had this title:
"How Did Birds Get Wings? We May Have Found The 'Missing Link' in Dinosaur Fossils"
Did the press release describe dinosaur fossils with half wings? No. Did the press release describe dinosaur fossils with even a fifth of a wing? No. The press release merely describes a membrane, a triangular and not bony structure on the front of some dinosaurs, which we are asked to believe migrated from the front of dinosaurs to the back of birds, to become one component of a wing, but not any of the bones or feathers of a wing. The claim that this is a missing link explaining a transition between dinosaurs and birds is preposterous. How long have people known about this little membrane in dinosaurs? A long time.
In cases such as this we see science press writers following the advice quoted above: "Make the headline super-compelling." Unofficially, the rule followed is: make the headline super-compelling, no matter how much you have to twist things. To paraphrase a saying about statistics, there are lies, there are damned lies, and then there are press releases about biological origins.
Postscript: A new press release from Rutgers sounds like it was competing for an inanity prize. The press release has the title "Rutgers Scientists Identify Substance That May Have Sparked Life on Earth." People fall "hook, line and sinker" for such drivel because our scientists have done such a very poor job of educating the public about the realities of biological complexity. Most people don't know that even the simplest reproducing cell requires a very special arrangement of many tens of thousands of amino acids, involving a very special organization of more than 100,000 atoms. The press release discusses an arrangement of a mere 13 amino acids, one not produced by simulating early Earth conditions, but produced by manual fiddling by scientists. In the release a scientist uses some trick language trying to fool us into thinking this mere peptide tells us something about proteins (far more complex molecules which require a special arrangement of more than 100 amino acids).
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