For a few hours last week, I had planned to write a column about the "five-second rule." Scientists at Manchester Metropolitan University in England had released a study showing that some foods (ham, cookies) were safer to eat than others (dried fruit, pasta) after being left on the floor to collect germs. The Huffington Post picked up the story, as did Gizmodo and Good Morning America and the TODAY Show. But the research ? if that's even the right word to use here ? was rotten from the start.
The first warning sign was the subject matter: The five-second rule has been tested, explained and at least partially debunked over and over again, for at least as long as I've been a journalist. The most notable example was a 2006 study by Paul Dawson of Clemson University, South Carolina, who published his findings that germs can hop right onto a slice of bologna in the peer-reviewed Journal of Applied Microbiology. The following year it was again debunked by a couple of undergraduates at Connecticut College, then once more by a seventh-grade science-fair project in 2008. And did I mention the nine-year-old in Kentucky? "A lot of bacteria grew on the cheese," explained little Courtney Mims to a science correspondent for the Lexington Herald-Leader.
More damning was the story's overseas origin. The five-second study arrived in the American press by way of the Daily Mail, which explained in its own coverage that the work had been funded by a manufacturer of cleaning products. It then advised readers to replace their mop heads every three months to "minimise risk" from dangerous bacteria. When I contacted Manchester Metropolitan University for more details, I learned that the "researchers" and "scientists" described in media reports amounted to one person ? a lab tech named Kathy Lees, who did not respond to my inquiries.
Faux research
Let's not single out the Mancunians, though: industry-funded science fluff litters the whole of the British Isles. Also in the past few weeks, the UK press fawned over a comely chip-shop girl from Kent who was found by a national television network to have a scientifically validated, perfect face. The British version of The Huffington Post reported on a mathematical formula for the "perfect sandwich" ? produced by a University of Warwick physicist in collaboration with a major bread manufacturer.
Spurious mathematical formulae concocted at the behest of PR firms compose their own journalism beat in England: In recent years, we've seen the perfect boiled egg, the perfect day, the perfect breasts, and many more examples of scientists getting paid to turn life into algebra.
As a naive magazine intern, I once took an assignment to write up one of these characteristically English equations ? a means of calculating the perfect horror movie. The team of mathematicians behind the research turned out to be a couple of recent grads from King's College London, who had watched some movies and gotten drunk on vodka on behalf of Sky Broadcasting. "We only spent a couple of hours doing it," one of them told me, "and didn't put all that much thought into whether it works or how accurate it is."
I'm not the first to notice this trend ? see Ben Goldacre's excellent "Bad Science" column in The Guardian, for example ? but it has started to worry me. A great garbage patch of science journalism has been forming across the Atlantic, and bits of flotsam are washing up on our shores. What makes the Brits so susceptible to these ginned-up studies and publicity stunts? And what happens when their faux research starts drifting across the internet?
This sounds like jingoism, I know. Vince Kiernan, a veteran reporter who now studies the history and practice of science journalism at Georgetown in Washington DC, doesn't see much difference between the coverage in Britain and the US. Science journalism is globalised, he told me, and US businesses employ their own set of PR shenanigans.
Maybe he's right: Even the New York Times makes a practice of letting companies tout their self-serving, unpublished research from time to time in its opinion pages. But it seems to me the Times would never run the shameless "labvertisements" that get play in the British press. More to the point, I don't think you'd find these cash-for-science stories even in our smaller, less scrupulous newspapers (television news may be a different story). And I can't remember ever seeing a product-sponsored mathematical formula that showed up first in the American press. Why not?
History of science coverage
I posed this question to a few of my favourite science journalists in both countries and got some vague answers. Not all British newspapers operate according to the same (low) standards, my sources told me, but even at the best venues it can be a struggle to stay out of the gutter. "When I was at The Times [of London], I judged my success as much by what I kept out of the paper as what I got into it," said Mark Henderson, former science editor and author of The Geek Manifesto (he also claims to have taken a hard line on dodgy formulae). The Daily Telegraph, now one of that nation's most egregious purveyors of junk science, by all accounts maintained a solid reputation until a few years ago, when two of its best reporters left.
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