Cite Your Source

My kids learned at an early age that they couldn't convince me of anything just by saying it.

"Cite your source," I'd say.

One time, when Aidan was about ten or eleven, he told me I should stop buying gas at certain gas stations because the company owners hated America. At the time, he attended a tiny conservative Christian school where the popular consensus was that Obama was a socialist fascist dictator, born in Kenya and bent upon destroying the American Way of Life. Some folks were quick to jump on any McCarthy-esque rumor that popped up on the internet.

The inherent socio-political contradictions of that assertion aside, I wanted to teach my kids to respect other people's views, but also to think for themselves by looking at them with a critical eye. 

"Don't believe it just because someone says it's true," I would say.

So, when he told me about the gas station, I asked him to cite his source.

"Ringo's mom," he said confidently.

"She's a secondary source," I said, and then I explained to him the difference between primary and secondary sources. This explanation involved me defending myself against the charge that I thought Ringo's mom was a liar. 

Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt in
Mad about You; photo from TV.msn.com

"What source was Ringo's mom citing?"

"She read an article," he said.

Ah-hah. The definitive, indestructible "she read an article" defense.

(Mr. Peevie and I watched a show in the 90s called Mad About You with Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser. We still quote one of those episodes, in which Helen Hunt's character Jamie argues with her husband Paul, and he asks her how she knows what she's claiming. "I read an article!" she says--and it becomes a recurring theme. I squandered an hour watching Mad About You clips to try to find this scene, to no avail. This is how seriously I take my Green Room duty. You're welcome.)

As it turns out, the politics of gasoline are far more complicated than a simplistic anti-America rumor would have it. Snopes breaks it down. Notice the list of sources at the bottom of the article.

Sometimes, even sources that appear on the surface to be legitimate lack scientific rigor and should be source-checked.. See, for example, this article on the dangers of vaccinations from a secondary source called The Free Thinker (which looks like the Libertarian version of Huffington Post),written by a dude named Dave Mihalovic.

It all comes down to science and math: does the article cite (and more importantly, link to) legitimate scientific sources? The vaccine article referenced above makes many claims, none of which are sourced. The author cites "secret" CDC documents--but doesn't link to them or provide screen shots. There's no way for a thinking person to double check his claims--we're just supposed to believe him.

Um, no.

The first link in the article is to an article in another secondary source with equally shady credentials--not to an FDA document or a CDC memo or a news story, but to another article by the same guy. "Here," Dave Mihalovic is essentially saying, "you can trust me, because I said it again over here in this other article." Please.

In the third paragraph, the article quotes Brian Hooker, "a PhD scientist" about a CDC cover-up of the alleged risks of vaccinations. Who is Brian Hooker? What are his credentials in medicine, and medical research? What replicated studies has he conducted, and with what legitimate scientific controls?

The answers are, in order: He is a biochemical engineer who works as a consultant in the biotech industry.  He has no medical credentials, and has done no studies, that I can find. He's just a guy who is motivated, sadly, by the alleged vaccine-caused autism of his own child.

Regarding the claims in this article that the CDC has covered up data from their own Vaccine Safety Datalink database showing a "very high link between Thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism rates in children": Show me the proof, dude.

The article claims that there are "a number" of public records that back up this claim--but only links to a 20-page Congressional Record from ten years ago. This document actually contradicts the authors claims: "...exposure to less than the minimal risk level is believed to be safe" and "the minimal risk level would need to be multiplied by ten to reach a level at which harm would be expected through exposure." You can find this out for yourself by clicking the link, and then control-F searching for the word "risk" and looking at the 18th occurrence of the word. See? I have done all the work for you.

You're welcome.

Whatever. This is just one example of millions, and just one topic of dozens that we encounter every day in the news, on Facebook, or in casual conversation, which requests our uncritical acceptance of a questionable assertion. 

Don't do it. Be a critical, questioning listener--not just about gas stations and vaccinations, but about everything--things that cause cancer, things that prevent heart attacks, things that pastors say, things that politicians say--and not just the ones you disagree with. You get the picture.

Or, alternately, you could just trust the opinions here at The Green Room, and I promise, we will always provide primary sources.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

I'm late to the party with this book review, as the book was published a couple of years ago now, and Henrietta's story has been updated on the pages of National Geographic and the New York Times. But for those of you who have not yet read it, or have not been around me when I'm going on and on about it--you deserve to be let in on the secret: this is an amazing story, and beautifully told by freelance science writer, Rebecca Skloot.

Henrietta Lacks died in 1950--but part of her still lives on, and I'm not talking about her soul. Her cells, people. Her cells. The Immortal Life is the story of Henrietta and her family and her now-famous immortal cells, known in science and medicine as HeLa, which jump-started the science of cell culturing and all the related scientific miracles that grew out of cell culturing.

When Skloot learned in a high school biology class about these omnipresent and imperishable cells, and about the woman they came from, she hungered to know more. She started on a journey through labs, hospitals, phonebooks, and cemeteries to get to know Henrietta and her descendants; and she crafted a tale of science, family, American history, and ethics that is unlike any other.

The cells were taken by doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital, without Henrietta's knowledge or consent, during her treatment for the cervical cancer that ultimately killed her. They were cultured in a lab, and miraculously, they didn't die like every other cell sample that the scientists had attempted to grow.

Henrietta Lacks' immortal cells, stained with dye.
Photo from Smithsonianmag.com

Meanwhile, Henrietta suffered through intense and unsuccessful treatments for her cervical cancer, and died. Her children had no idea that part of their mother lived on until Henrietta's daughter, Deborah, received a phone call from a reporter, asking about her mother who had been dead for 20 years. The reporter wanted to know what she thought about her mother's cells being so famous and important to science and medicine--and Deborah said WTF?

Skloot's narrative traces the incredible story of Henrietta Lacks' immortal cells--"the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory." Her cells were part of research into the genes that cause cancer and those that suppress it; they helped develop drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson's disease; and they've been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted diseases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative cellular effects of working in sewers.

No one knows why Henrietta's cells lived and thrived--but they did; and the scientists who first successfully grew the cells sent batches of them to other scientists, who grew more of them to use in their own experiments. To this day, Henrietta's cells are living and growing and being used in medical and scientific applications around the world and even in space.

Scientists had been trying to grow living cells in the lab since before the turn of the century, but the cells kept dying. It was not until 1951, when Henrietta Lacks' cells began growing in the lab, that the science of cell culture was born. This happened to coincide with the biggest polio epidemic in history, and HeLa cells were used to grow the Salk vaccine and demonstrate its effectiveness. These experiments soon led to advances in virology, genetics, radiation research, and many other branches of science and medicine; they went into orbit on satellites and with the first humans;

Henrietta's cells quickly became famous around the world; they were "taken, bought, sold,
and used in research without her knowledge or theirs." Meanwhile, her family remained poor and unknown, having no awareness and no control over the use of their own genetic material.

Henrietta’s drama becomes the story of ethical dilemmas in science and medicine: informed consent, medical and genetic privacy, patient confidentiality, genetic discrimination,
biological patents, and cell ownership. With sensitivity and perseverance, Skloot digs out the details of Henrietta's life, and the lives of her family members; she weaves the complex science and the deeply personal family story into a colorful, touching narrative.