If you have ever worked in a molecular or medical biology research laboratory, chances are one of the first things you learnt was tissue culture (or the microbiology equivalents). Even if you know nothing about biology, you’ve probably heard mentions of “cell culture” on the news, or at the very least heard about the results of studies in tissue culture. If you hear about “cell lines”, you’ve got culture. If you hear about a “laboratory study” showing that your favourite chemical is carcinogenic, you’ve probably got culture. If you hear about new trials on a miracle cancer cure that has been shown to be effective in “preliminary laboratory tests”, you’ve probably got culture. Everything from zombie epidemics to £10,000 animal-free beef is cell culture. Knowing a little bit about what tissue culture is, and what its uses and limitations are, is therefore important when answering such questions as “is my baby’s bottle poisonous?”, “is stem-cell research ethical?” and “is vitamin C an effective cure for colds/cancer/HIV?”

So. What is tissue culture (TC)? It’s when you take specific cells from a multi-cellular animal and grow them in a dish full of nutrients (a mimic of your blood serum). The point of doing this is to create a system on which to experiment which does not require growing and killing lots of individuals — something that is, for some reason, considered unethical. Especially when it’s humans you propose using. Typically, human or other mammalian tissues are used — especially “model organisms” such as mice. You can use healthy or diseased cell lines from all sorts of different organs. Once you’ve grown up a nice batch of cells in your dish, you can see how they respond to your cancer drug, environmental contaminant, or new junk food ingredient. You can see exactly how the behaviour of your cells changes over the minutes, hours and days of exposure; how they recover after the chemical has been flushed away; how your cancer drug works in dozens of different tumours; how your junk food ingredient works in the old and young, male and female, fit and fat; and how your environmental contaminant interacts with other environmental contaminants. It’s great. If you work hard enough, you can know everything you want to know about your chemical within a week. Wipe out cancer and save the world by next Monday. At least, that’s what the animal-rights movement would have you believe. And the tabloid press fall for it daily.

Trouble is, it’s very easy to get superficially interesting answers using TC. Which makes it very easy to convince a journalist that you have important results, but very difficult to convince a scientist. That’s not to say that TC is not important. But everything that we measure in TC is an estimate of what happens in real life situations. It’s a model that uses surrogate measures from which we can develop hypotheses about what happens in reality. A bad analogy is in order, I think. Suppose you are building a car. You want to protect your future drivers from side-on impacts. Very early on in the design process, you have an engineer conduct strength tests on different materials and designs for doors. From this, you can narrow down the field of designs, and make hypotheses about which designs will perform best on the road. But you can not be sure that the strongest material will provide the best protection against injury and death. You would want play with the crash test dummies, before putting the car on the road. And once the car is on the market, you would analyse incidents. Because when the door is attached to the car and put on the road, a huge number of other variables comes into play. And so it is with, er… what was the topic again? Tissue culture.

Cells did not evolve for growth in a dish. They evolved in the context of cooperation with a vast number of other specialist cells in a body. They are not fine-tuned for survival in the absence of skin, an immune system, a digestive system, liver and kidneys. They are not supposed to live like barnacles on plastic. But if you’ve worked with research quality cell lines, you’ll know that it’s surprisingly easy to make them grow in a dish. Feed them every couple of days, and they’ll happily live for many months. Well go and say that to the post-docs and technicians who made it that way. They were up until midnight processing disgusting lumps of freshly excised tumour. They spent months trying out different combinations of nutrients and fungicides in an attempt to make the cells survive longer than a week. They may be easy to grow now, but don’t think there wasn’t any effort involved. Billions of cells died in the process of making those few grow. Under these circumstances, you can hardly expect the cells not have evolved a little. You are introducing them to a vast number of novel mutagens by taking them away from the protection of skin. And putting anything into a new environment is going to mean new selection pressures. When you finally manage to immortalise your cell line, is it because you’ve perfectly adapted the conditions to the cells, or because the cells have adapted to the conditions?

So. There are all sorts of reasons why TC can not be anything more than an approximation of what is happening in real life. A useful approximation, but unreliable in the absence confirmatory evidence from in vivo and population studies. But these are only the intrinsic limitations of TC. When judging the merits of TC based research, you must also take into the account the fact that TC is easily misused and misrepresented, and that charlatans are doing it all the time. TC is a favourite of cargo-cult healers and nutritionists — those who like to keep up a superficial appearance of having a scientific basis for their quackery. Take, for example, the shamen who pedal vitamin C as an HIV/AIDS drug (Patrick Holford, for example) or as a cancer therapy. They will tell you that in TC, vitamin C has been shown to kill tumour cells, or those cells that are infected with HIV. Therefore, the reasoning goes, we should abandon proven therapies, in favour of taking some vitamin supplements. Trouble is, you can chuck a big lump of any chemical in a dish of cells and the cells will die. I could pour a bag of vitamin C into a dish of healthy cells. They will die. Conclusion: those vitamin supplements are deadly poisonous. Except that your cells will never be exposed to a bag of vitamin C, because you have skin, a digestive system, and kidneys. And because people just don’t go around pouring bags of vitamin C down their throats. I could spit in a dish of cells and tell you that spit is a killer. It’s not.

But it’s not just charlatans that abuse TC. Many legitimate scientists bend the rules a little. They may not even be aware that they are doing it. Take the case of Bisphenol A (BPA), something I did a little work on a couple of years ago. BPA is a component of some plastics, notably bottles. It is known to very slowly leach out of the bottles and into your drink. There is a little bit of evidence (mostly from rats) to show that consuming BPA may be harmful. And there are a lot of TC experiments on the chemical. BPA is a xenoestrogen, meaning that it mimics the activity of estrogens. Estrogen, of course, regulates prolactin release, and cell division (particularly in the breasts). We know that BPA mimics estrogens because when we put some in our dish of tumour cells, we see that within seconds the estrogen receptors have been activated, and all the other effects of estrogen follow. There are loads of results to confirm this because there are a lot of experiments into the effect of estrogen (there’s plenty of money in breast cancer research). If you’re doing the experiment anyway, it’s hardly any more effort to look at BPA. And you can pretend that your research has another potential medical application. Since it’s not the primary aim of your research, the journal’s reviewers won’t notice that you’re using it at a thousand times the concentration that you would find it in the body. So even if enough BPA does leach out of your bottle, and even if BPA does do interesting things in the body, a large proportion of the TC studies will be irrelevant to understanding how it does those things, because they look at inappropriately large concentrations and inappropriately small timescales.

So, next time you are flicking through the health pages of the Daily Mail — which I know all of you like to do — engage healthy skepticism when they update the list of miracle cures and carcinogens. Like statistics, tissue culture is incredibly useful — whether you’re searching for the truth, or a convincing lie.

Here’s an interesting one: Genesis chapter 30. If you think Darwin got inheritance wrong, try the Bible.

30:28 And he [Laban] said, Appoint me thy wages, and I will give it.

30:29 And he said unto him, Thou knowest how I have served thee, and how thy cattle was with me.

30:30 For it was little which thou hadst before I came, and it is now increased unto a multitude; and the LORD hath blessed thee since my coming: and now when shall I provide for mine own house also?

30:31 And he said, What shall I give thee? And Jacob said, Thou shalt not give me any thing: if thou wilt do this thing for me, I will again feed and keep thy flock.

30:32 I will pass through all thy flock to day, removing from thence all the speckled and spotted cattle, and all the brown cattle among the sheep, and the spotted and speckled among the goats: and of such shall be my hire.

30:33 So shall my righteousness answer for me in time to come, when it shall come for my hire before thy face: every one that is not speckled and spotted among the goats, and brown among the sheep, that shall be counted stolen with me.

30:34 And Laban said, Behold, I would it might be according to thy word.

30:35 And he removed that day the he goats that were ringstraked and spotted, and all the she goats that were speckled and spotted, and every one that had some white in it, and all the brown among the sheep, and gave them into the hand of his sons.

30:36 And he set three days’ journey betwixt himself and Jacob: and Jacob fed the rest of Laban’s flocks.

30:37 And Jacob took him rods of green poplar, and of the hazel and chesnut tree; and pilled white strakes in them, and made the white appear which was in the rods.

30:38 And he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink.

30:39 And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted.

30:40 And Jacob did separate the lambs, and set the faces of the flocks toward the ringstraked, and all the brown in the flock of Laban; and he put his own flocks by themselves, and put them not unto Laban’s cattle.

30:41 And it came to pass, whensoever the stronger cattle did conceive, that Jacob laid the rods before the eyes of the cattle in the gutters, that they might conceive among the rods.

30:42 But when the cattle were feeble, he put them not in: so the feebler were Laban’s, and the stronger Jacob’s.

30:43 And the man increased exceedingly, and had much cattle, and maidservants, and menservants, and camels, and asses.

So, I think the deal here is that Jacob makes some pact where he gets to take all of the stripey, speckled, and spotted cows, sheep, and goats, from this other dude Laban’s stock. He does this, leaving Laban with homogeneous flocks of plain individuals. He then attempts fraud by making Laban’s plain individuals mate while looking at stripey things, so that the offspring will be stripey, and Jacob can claim they are his own. And, hey, guys, it totally worked.

It’s not actually at all surprising that the offspring of two plain individuals turn out stripey, speckled, or spotty. That sort of thing is pretty normal. Traits can skip generations and reappear later for a variety of reasons. It could be that one or the other trait is linked to a dominant/recessive gene system; or that they are influenced by complicated combinations of genes, which are shuffled in each generation; or that they are capable of being thrown either way by developmental switches. Indeed, it’s possible even to speculate on reasons why the “feebleness” of cattle might be linked to the tendency to breed true for more traits.

So, assuming that the story has some basis in reality (lets pretend, anyway), Jacob probably just developed a superstition. A convenient myth to explain a mysterious natural phenomenon, while allowing him to believe that he had some influence over that phenomenon. Perhaps he noticed some stripey pattern in the landscape one day, noticed that there was mating going on in the vicinity of the stripes, and then noticed the stripey lambs being born. A meaningless correlation would then appear, superficially, to be a principle of inheritance. From there, the superstition would develop as the believer started counting hits, forgetting misses, and discovering his “ability” to select the stronger more desirable individuals as parents (or post-hoc reasoning that because it has sired a stripey calf, it must be a strong bull).

Alternatively, of course, Goddidit.

The past few weeks seem to have seen laments for the decline of journalism and obituaries for old media reaching a critical mass. BoraZ has kindly collected a few dozen so that I don’t have to.

Perhaps it’s just because I’ve been reading Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News, and because Davies did the last Skeptics in the Pub, that I have been noticing that the decline of newspapers is reaching this critical stage. Davies is a Guardian investigative journalist, and he’s breaking the rules by telling us just what a state the media is in. Flat Earth News, written two years ago, before the American newspapers started going bankrupt, and British newspapers shed half their workforce, documents the many multiplicative flaws in the system of news gathering, reporting, and dissemination which cause journalists to churn out the crap the passes for newspapers these days.

Davies’ conclusion is that journalism — a noble profession of bright people — has, largely as a cost-cutting measure, been reduced tochurnalism . Instead of spending a week researching a story in great depth and telling us the important facts that we didn’t know, journalists have been reduced to rewriting a dozen wire stories and press releases each day. Journalists no longer have the time, the background knowledge, or the luxury of specialisation, required to find out whether the words they are writing bear any resemblance to reality. Nor do they have the time to establish what conflicts of interest of their sources have and whether they are hiding things — instead, the words can be reported as he-said/she-said, and the report can technically never be wrong.

Indeed, the media and public relationships industry have evolved a sophisticated mutualistic relationship. Newspapers could not fill their papers without press release writers doing all their research (and even choosing their words) for them, and in return, interested parties get their side of the story, or their product, prominently placed in the story.

M’colleague suggested that this thesis sounded a little like a conspiracy theory. I, however, am generally convinced. I am convinced because I have seen it work so many times in the field that I am familiar with — science and medicine. I have seen how the British tabloid (and even broadsheet) newspapers build their oncological ontological database from poorly written press releases. I have seen how interested parties both in industry and pressure groups place their doubt or certainty in news stories about the environment. I’ve seen the basic failure of fact-checking as elementary mistakes in press releases about newly published journal papers are faithfully replaced in all papers. I’ve even seen my own words from Wikipedia appear in The Metro‘s obituary of John Peel. And I’ve seen how successfully our own side has fought back on the media’s own terms, when Sense About Science press released their detox dossier in the slow news week after Christmas.

Flat Earth News provides the overarching explanatory theory for why so much of the news media is, to quote a comment on Friday’s Ryanair-toilets “news story” publicity stunt, “such a great lorry load of cock.” Science bloggers like a good whinge about a bad science or medicine story in the paper, but the problem is much greater than just a few humanities graduates trying to write about science. That skepticism you apply when reading the science stories needs to apply to the politics, foreign events, business, and everything else besides, because the authors of those items know no more about their subject than the humanities graduates covering science do about theirs.

Journalists can cry that democracy is not possible without them; but there’s nothing empowering about a media that churns back the press releases of government departments and military agencies. There is nothing empowering in the Daily Mail.

For eight years, the United States was the brawling village idiot of the developed world, so far as Europe seemed to be concerned. But in Britain, we are constantly reminded that, in addition to our own peculiar intellectual failures, we are not immune to catching the American anti-reality bugs. Everyone’s favourite example is creationism. Over the past couple of years we’ve had the confusingly named Truth In Science sending creationist DVDs to teachers; dense dentistry students getting in the news for protesting Steve Jones’ lectures; Ken Ham preaching in Westminster; and most shockingly, living national treasure Sir David Attenborough getting sent hate mail from them. And then this week, Christian think-tank Theos press-released another creationism-evolution survey, and all of the newspapers dutifully ran headlines announcing that only a quarter of Britons accept evolution.

If you’ve heard the “creationists are invading” warning repeated enough times, you might not even notice just how ridiculous some of this stuff is. Sure, American fundamentalists bought enough creation museum tickets to pay for Ken Ham to go on a jolly to London. Sure, a few individual halfwits will complain about their sensibilities having been offended, and get a lazy journalist to believe that it is news. Sure, there are even a small number of people in this country so tragically disturbed that they feel they must threaten one of our greatest heroes. There are even a couple of organisations with rich enough benefactors that they can waste the world’s precious resources sending junk mail to science teachers. But to the extent that three out of four Britons are out of touch with reality to the extent of six orders of magnitude?^[1] I can’t believe that’s true. And it’s not.

Do you remember the story in December 2007, about the creationist theme park being built in Lancashire? The blogosphere was aghast at how low the UK had sunk. Anyone actually visited the theme park yet? Oh, no, because it still doesn’t exist. The AH Trust, the charity behind the initiative, have a amusing professional-looking website^[2] to tell you all about their plans, though. Apparently the £3.5 million aircraft-hanger exhibit will be the “World’s [sic] first 3D Cinematic Hologram Theme Park.” According to their annual report and accounts, the AH Trust consists of an engineer (always with the engineers!), his wife, and their two mates. They have just over 100 grand in the bank. Not being an accountant, I have no idea why all except £461 of that is currently just resting in the donors’ own bank accounts. The chances of such a theme park being constructed are nil, but somehow I feel that the AH Trust has served its purpose, with newspapers and bloggers doing their bit by humouring them.

While creationism in the UK is clearly a problem which needs tackling, I think it is clear that the problem is consistently overblown. To the lazy hack journalist, creation vs evolution sounds like a fundamental issue in culture, society, science and philosophy, that is of some great importance. So any crackpot and his mates down the pub church can say something retarded and get a he-said-she-said write up in the rags. And bloggers everywhere will hail it as another sign of the rise of creationism, and the descent of the UK into an irrational non-reality based world. We all seem so good at spotting, and correcting, the nonsense newspapers write about science. So why is the skepticism not applied a little more widely?

Footnotes

1. Roughly the difference between the age of the universe, and the age creationists think the universe is. As Dawkins says “that’s a non-trivial error.”
2. Link removed from the repost because the site is now occupied by domain squatters.

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In a piece of contrarianism worthy of Jack of Kent, it was suggested by a number of people (e.g. here) on twitter that the latest round of Gillian McKeith bashing would serve only to make a martyr of the awful old poo lady. Perhaps she would like that. She has always left me with the impression of somebody lonely, in a mid-life crisis, absolutely desperate for fame and attention (I don’t know; an impression only, of course, no objective insight into her character is implied).

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