Author: Ophelia Benson

This is part of an interview of Colin Blakemore by Jeremy Stangroom which took place in 2004. The whole interview appears in What Scientists Think, Routledge 2005.

The issue of animal experimentation is not the only area of dispute in the field of medical science. There is also, for example, considerable public debate about the use of stem cells – roughly speaking, cells which have the capacity to differentiate into cells of any type – in medical research. What, I ask Blakemore, is the importance of stem cell research?

‘It’s very easy to slip into hype when answering this question, but even so, I would say that the discovery of stem cells, and of their potential to transform into any tissue type in the body, really offers the possibility of one of the most significant advances in the history of medical treatments,’ he replies. ‘Most importantly, the kinds of diseases which potentially can be treated with stem cell therapy is a whole range of presently incurable diseases which are growing in rate in the population because of ageing. These are the degenerative diseases. The possibility of replacing tissue which no longer functions properly is extremely exciting. The kinds of conditions which might well be treatable, and for which there are already animal models of treatment, include Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, heart disease, bone disease, stroke and cancer.’

In May 2004, the world’s first stem cell bank, partly funded by the MRC, was opened in the UK. On its opening, it contained two stem cell lines, developed by teams from Newcastle and London. What’s the idea behind banking different stem cell lines like this?

‘There are actually a number of reasons for banking stem cell lines,’ Blakemore answers. ‘The main one is to provide uniform standards for typing the cells; for understanding their composition and makeup. It is estimated that perhaps as few as one or two hundred different stem cell lines, each with different immunological characteristics, will be enough to provide tissue type matching for virtually every person who needs a transplant. So it’s a bit like matching blood groups, or indeed tissue typing for organ transplants; it is necessary to get the match right, which is the main reason for collecting more than one line.

‘The other reason is that different stem cell lines might have a better capacity to transform into particular kinds of adult tissue. We don’t know enough yet about the basic biology of stem cells to know this for certain, but it is possible that although all stem cells from embryos are derived at a similar stage of development, between 0 and 14 days of age, some of the lines will be better at transforming into say heart or brain than others. So this is a second reason for having more than one line.’

The moral objections to stem cell research tend to be voiced primarily by people who object to the use of embryos in the collection of stem cells. For example, Patrick Cusworth, spokesperson for the anti-abortion charity Life, claimed that the use of embryos in stem cell research ‘reduces human life to little more than a pharmaceutical product’. What does Blakemore make of this kind of argument?

‘Well, I said earlier that we should have a special attitude towards other humans, so crucial to this argument is how we define a person,’ he replies. ‘A pro-Life group will say that a fertilised egg is a human being. I don’t accept this; if any cell which has a full complement of DNA and is capable of transforming into a human being is a person, then every cell in a human body is a person. We now know from Dolly the sheep that if we take the nucleus from an adult somatic cell – a cell from our skin, for example – and put it into a vacant egg, then it can become a human being. Should we therefore be worried about every cell which sloughs off from the surface of our skin? Should we treat each one of those cells as if it were a person? Obviously not. We have to recognise that an embryo, certainly before the nervous system begins to form, is just a bundle of cells.’

People who are opposed to research which uses stem cells taken from embryos also claim that there is no scientific case for the practice; that adult stem cells will do just as well. Is there any truth to this claim?

‘This sounds very like the argument which the animal rights lobby makes about the alternatives to animal experimentation,’ Blakemore replies. ‘My response is to say show me the heart surgery which is going on using adult stem cells. It doesn’t exist. It might be that harvesting adult stem cells will be the right thing to do at some point in the future. One of the great advantages of adult stem cells is that you can do autotransplantation; you can take cells from a patient, let’s say bone marrow stem cells, or neural stem cells from the nose, grow them up so that there are enough of them, and then use them to treat whatever problem the person you took them from is suffering. In this situation, there is no difficulty with tissue typing, it will match perfectly. But we don’t have the expertise at the moment to do this; we would need to know a lot more about stem cells, and this knowledge is going to come from the study of embryonic stem cells. But the hope is that one day we will be able to use adult stem cells.’

What about if a person has an illness which is caused by a genetic mutation? Presumably it won’t be easy to treat something like Huntington’s, for example, with a patient’s own stem cells?

‘It’s true that if a person carries a genetic mutation then it is present in their stem cells; but actually this doesn’t necessarily mean that you couldn’t use their own stems cells in a treatment,’ Blakemore says. ‘Huntington’s disease is a dominant genetic disorder. The symptoms, though, don’t appear until the person is thirty-five or forty years old. So although the gene is carried from birth, it doesn’t express itself until later; the problems accumulate gradually. It is conceivable, therefore, that if you were to derive neural stem cells from someone with Huntington’s disease, and you then transformed them into new nerve cells, that they too would last for many years before the condition showed itself. So there is this possibility.

‘One of the things which should be emphasised about stem cell research is that it is going to provide much greater insight into the nature of disease. It isn’t just a matter of developing new treatments, it is a way to understanding disease. For example, stem cells are helping us to understand the cancer process, because, like cancer cells, stem cells are immortal. Also, our understanding of the normal development of human embryos will be helped by understanding stem cells; we’ll learn about the rules which cause uncommitted cells to transform into committed cells. Finally, we can learn about the nature of certain diseases by studying the stem cells of people who carry genetic defects.’

Does Blakemore have a view about how the various issues and debates surrounding medical research are likely to play out? Is he optimistic about the future?

‘I think it is necessary to learn the lessons of history,’ he replies. ‘I remember that after the first heart transplant there was intense criticism from the church, civil libertarians, medical ethicists and the animal rights lobby. People complained that the original research had been done on pigs; that the procedure was a dangerous experimental technique; and that it was possible that patients were being coerced into undergoing transplants. All the same kinds of arguments that we hear now were being played out then. But people today think that heart transplants are a medical miracle. The public completely accepts the procedure. Social and moral attitudes then are not absolute and fixed; they are influenced by the evidence of benefit. My view is that if we keep the public informed, if we move forward gradually, then, as and when the benefits accrue, the issues will become progressively less contentious. I am actually extremely optimistic about the future of medical research. The investment of the last fifty years in basic biological research is going to deliver in very big ways in terms of human health and the quality of people’s lives.’

His pockets were stuffed with fifty different kinds of conflicting literature – pamphlets for all seasons, rhetoric for all reasons. When this man handed you a tract you took it no matter what the subject: the dangers of atomic power plants, the role played by the International Jewish Cartel in the overthrow of friendly governments, the CIA-Contra-cocaine connection, the farm workers’ unions, the Jehovah’s Witnesses (If You Can Answer These Ten Questions ‘Yes’, You Have Been SAVED!) the Blacks for Militant Equality, the Kode of the Klan. He had them all, and more, too. [Stephen King, The Stand]

The man (although not really a man) in the extract above is Randall Flagg, an agent of chaos and destruction who brings down a plague on twentieth-century America.

If Flagg (or is it Walter O’Dim?) stalked our land today, the tracts in his jacket would be different. He would offer you a DVD explaining how 9/11 was arranged by the US government, a pamphlet revealing how reflexology can cure cancer, another that let you know that condoms cause AIDS (or one that said that AIDS doesn’t exist); a leaflet picking at the holes in the theory of evolution; a pamphlet from Gillian McKeith (‘YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT!’) claiming that human beings are capable of photosynthesis; a newspaper report linking the MMR vaccine to autism; an article challenging the historicity of the Holocaust.

Damian Thompson demolishes all these snake-oil merchants and more in his fantastic book Counterknowledge – perhaps the nearest thing we have to Hemingway’s fabled bullshit detector.

Yet his work sounds a little like a Louis Theroux-style giggle at the fringes of society, and indeed Thompson does have his laugh-out-loud moments. Here’s his account of a tour of Ohio’s creationist museum:

[Daily Telegraph journalist] Russell was shown animatronic children and dinosaurs playing together in the Garden of Eden. His guide, Ken Ham, from the fast-growing Young Earth organisation Answers in Genesis, explained that dinosaurs survived Noah’s Flood and roamed the earth until quite recently. ‘There are dragon legends all over the world. Why? Because they have a basis in truth, a basis in real animals. So, even though the word dinosaur wasn’t coined until 1841, we would say that it’s very possible that what people today call dinosaurs were known as dragons.’ But how did they manage to fit such gigantic creatures onto Noah’s Ark? ‘They only took young dinosaurs on board.’

But the joke is on us sceptics, because fringe ideas are taken increasingly seriously. The British government spends millions of pounds on building homeopathic hospitals, despite the fact that homeopathy has no medical value; charalatans like Gillian McKeith are given their own TV series and treated as experts in their fields; London houses publish books explaining that China discovered America in 1421 and that Jesus’s descendants are alive and well in France; a former UK government minister, Michael Meacher (also a onetime candidate for the governing Labour Party leadership) subscribes to 9/11 conspiracy theories.

The enhanced status of counterknowledge makes it dangerous. This is especially true in the field of ‘alternative medicine’ (i.e: not medicine). If you take the advice of quack nutritionist Patrick Holford and give your child a homeopathic vaccination for meningitis instead of an actual vaccination, you are exposing that child to a deadly disease. Putting alternative medicine on a level with actual medicine takes us into a world we thought was gone: the medieval age, where millions died because the alternative was all there was.

And that is just in the developed world. 5.5 million South Africans are HIV positive, yet its government refuses to distribute the antiretroviral drugs its people need. The administration’s insane arguments are bolstered by Western AIDS denialists, who take a Gillian McKeith-style approach to the condition.

The world’s leaning denialist is Peter Deusberg, a molecular biologist who argues that to prevent AIDS, and even cure the disease, it is necessary only to eat properly and abstain from toxic drugs. The American government’s top AIDS adviser, Anthony Fauci, takes a different view, as the New Yorker reported in March 2007. After hearing Deusberg speak at an AIDS research conference, the normally mild-mannered Fauci erupted. ‘This is murder,’ he said. ‘It’s really that simple.’

Thompson adds that Deusberg was appointed to a South African presidential panel in the late nineties.

Why counterknowledge? Conservatives would say that its popularity is caused by the decline of traditional religion, and I think this is Thompson’s view, too:

Consider the following statistics. Between 1980 and 2005, British church attendance fell from 4.7 million to 3.3 million… The number of weddings in the UK dropped from 480,000 in 1972 to 284,000 in 2005. Each of these trends reflects the fragmentation of traditional authority structures – churches, political parties and the two-parent family – that previous generations rarely questioned… The subjective side of human experience takes over from the objective.

Humans have an innate need to believe, and in the absence of churches they will turn to cultic superstitions. The fevers started in the 1960s when social revolution destroyed the authority of the family and the church. As the old saying goes, if you don’t believe in God, you’ll believe anything.

Personally, I agree with Francis Wheen: if you believe in God, you’ll believe anything. State-sanctioned faiths (and what is a religion but a very successful cult?) don’t keep the lid on popular delusions: they set a precedent, ripping open the lining at the edge of rational thought. Let’s face it, if you can believe that a virginal woman gave birth to the son of God, who is later killed only to be brought back to life – then acupuncture and healing crystals will be quite easy to get your head around. Why favour one form of counterknowledge over another?

In any case, the phenomenon is indulged by conservatives as much as leftists. (If you don’t believe me you should read a copy of the Daily Mail, a newspaper whose mission is – in Ben Goldacre’s words – to divide the world’s inanimate objects into those that either cause, or cure, cancer.) As Thompson says, the free market loves counterknowledge. The idea underlying quack healthcare, that you can beat disease by cultivating a spiritual purity (or ‘SAY NO TO CANCER!’ as Patrick Holford puts it) is more than compatible with Victorian conservatism and social Darwinism. If all ailments are preventable by looking after the inner harnonies and eating the right foods, then people who get sick have only themselves to blame. There’s no need for governments to spend money on universal heathcare because if anyone becomes ill then they must jolly well deserve it.

But across the political spectrum there is widespread disillusionment with rationalism and Enlightenment values, which are now associated with the Iraq project and seen as concepts of a purely Western elite determined to impose ‘our’ idea of democracy and human rights across the world. (The quotemarks are an essential part of the argument.) The Enlightenment is for hopeless idealists, conniving politicians, fuddy-duddy Oxford professors and militant atheists.

Above all the Enlightement is mainstream, and people despise the mainstream. The mainstream is McDonalds and Ian McEwan and George W Bush. The mainstream is hated above all else, which explains the strange convergences of thought between ostensibly opposed fringe groups like the SWP and Hamas, between American creationists and fundamentalist Muslims, and between leftwing 9/11 deniers and Neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers. This happens even when their theories mutually contradict each other. As Thompson says:

An author who believes that Stonehenge was built by Aztecs will cheerfully recommend the work of someone who thinks it was built by the Priory of Sion, because they both recognise their real enemy as orthodox scholarship.

Anything that’s against the mainstream can’t be all bad: and having rejected the mainstream, intellectuals then throw themselves behind another. Gavin Menzies, who wrote a book claiming that China discovered America (it didn’t) now does speaking tours of Chinese universities and has senior-level friends in the regime.

Thompson quotes the writer and editor Michael Shermer on the roots of counterknowledge: ‘I think the problem lies deeper than this. To get to it we must dig through the layers of culture and society into the individual human mind and heart.’ And indeed, people trying to explain the appeal of irrationalism will inevitably turn to psychological analysis.

Imagine being a 9/11 Truther or a believer in homeopathy. You have unearthed a vast, hidden conspiracy that most of the world has completely missed. Either it is the conspiracy of PNAC engineering the Twin Towers demolitions as a pretext to declare war against the Middle East, or a secret plan by the medical/scientific/pharmaceutical establishment to cover up the healing powers of alternative medicine so they can carry on selling useless drug treatments.

You can dismiss the testimony of most doctors, scientists, physicists or engineers because their very experience and qualifications show that they are part of the elite and therefore have an interest in covering up the scam. Indeed, any contradictory evidence can be ignored – it will have been planted. Your own lack of evidence doesn’t bother you; obviously, the conspirators are going to cover their tracks. The absence of proof is proof. Ignorance is the smoking gun.

Most people reject your explanations because they are brainwashed by the corporate media. Only you, and a handful of fellow Truthers, are smart enough to see through the lies. What a boost! And presumably, when the conspiracy is found out, your greater intelligence and heroism will be recognised and you will be given the power and rewards such qualities accord you.

Finally, I think that the conspiracy minded are people in need of reassurance. They can’t handle the random, the chaos of life, the disasters that can come out of a clear blue sky. It is more comforting to believe that George Bush destroyed the Twin Towers than Osama bin Laden. It’s more comforting because we can vote Bush out, and put him in jail. At the heart of conspiracism is a message of subliminal succour: don’t worry, your government is in control. Go to sleep. Sssshhh…

Purveyors of counterknowledge are not revolutionaries. They are reactionaries, seeking comfort and status from dark dreams.

Counterknowledge, Damian Thompson, Atlantic 2008