Cicero once commented that it was impossible for any two members of the College of Augurs to pass one another in the street without bursting into laughter. Any well educated member of the academic elite - so long as their self-aggrandising megalomania is kept in check - realizes that the same can be said of ’scientists’. In many ways scientists are becoming the priestly class in our society supported by a complicated scaffolding of esoteric knowledge. The primary function of the scientific cultural institutions we are taught to revere is not to disseminate reality to the masses, but rather to comfort the uneducated. Upon joining the academic world as a researcher one of the first things learned is that the intellectual giants are just people who haven’t a got a clue about anything even in their own field. The difficulty becomes admitting that because we are enculturated in such a way that we rely on the institutions we create in order to make sense of our world. Here I’m referring to my own culture because trying to assign that same ‘need to know’ about the world to other groups opens a whole other can of theoretical worms. In many ways the institutions of science have replaced the ‘churches’ and organized religions although many would be infuriated by the idea. It is plain to see if you take a look at even the last five years of publication in any academic journal. Ideas that were seen as foundational and well constructed have been assaulted and turned over. Apparently, depending on who you ask, the human genome consists of only 1/3 of the number of genes originally predicted before the mapping began over a decade ago. One of the results is that the function and operation of ‘genes’ has become increasingly difficult to pinpoint. Even an agreed upon definition of the term is impossible to find and it has only become a way of speaking to the public (the uneducated masses seeking comfort) about ’scientific’ discoveries. Only a few months ago the BBC ran a segment on obesity and a ‘fat gene’ was referred to. It takes no fewer than 3 or 4 alleles to make up your eye-colour. How many do you suppose it takes to affect your body weight? Even the once deterministic view of genetics made popular in the 80s has been abandoned by prominent science, but the wholly incorrect view of genes being ‘responsible’ for anything is held onto like a safety blanket by the public. If the venerable ’scientists’ can’t define it, what intellectual right do laypeople have to use it in common discussion? As was mentioned previously, chemotherapy is used as a treatment for something thought of as a flaw in a cell’s genetic sequence that tells it to stop dividing. There is no guarantee whatsoever that this is the only or even the primary cause for cancer. The line between genetic and environmental influence is continuing to blur as genetic research carries on. So, if we can’t define gene and we don’t really know what cancer is - why it starts, exactly how to stop it, etc. - and the treatments we use are only effective a % of the time (another easy to understand example of the intellectual fallacy - if we actually understood it, we should be able stop it 100% of the time) then what does that say about the ‘ivory tower’. Once you’re there you realize that the people in it - the ’scientists’ - really are like Cicero’s members of the College of Augers. The majority of the population is akin to children asking what the stars are made of. The child doesn’t care what the answer is so long as it is delivered with authority and provides some comfort that their world is understood. If we can understand it, we can control it. Therefore, in many ways science has become the place to turn for those who refuse to believe in the divine or don’t want to participate in organized religions, but still desperately want to sleep at night believing in something. The word ‘belief’ is, itself, a historically specific Christian development suitable for another discussion. So, ’scientists’ throw on the white lab coat, speak with an authoritative voice, and whisper into the ears of the populace that they are safe and ‘mommy and daddy love them’.

Only just over a century ago ‘doctors’ used to inject mercury into the urethras of sailors with a large metal syringe to treat VD (venereal disease). Today we inject various tissues with radioactive material to treat cancer. In both cases the level of understanding regarding the condition was in flux and hardly warrants(ed) the use of any treatment if you stop to think about it. As the Victorian Era doctors were certain that mercury was the cure for what we now would call a bacterial infection we too are made to believe that certainty exists regarding modern treatments. Using only the example of mercury and VD, we can reason that due to the constantly changing state of human knowledge, the culturally constructed manner in which scientific knowledge is generated and disseminated, and the simple, yet distressing, fact that we know very little about anything as a species it is possible to reason that modern medicine is faulty. Scientists today are flailing about in the dark just as much as a poor sailor with metal syringe in his pee pee after sticking it where it doesn’t belong. It happens to be a property of mercury that it kills organic life. So, if your VD (a term originally used to describe a host of infections and viruses) happens to be a bacterial infection primarily located in your urinary tract then filling that tract with an agent that kills organisms would do the trick. However, imagine that it only works 30% of the time - although no such trials and publications were being made at the time - is it really a cure for anything? The mercury is also poisonous to the human organism. Similarly, modern scientists would say to the public that chemotherapy works - a percentage of the time if you read the medical publications. So, is chemotherapy really a cure? It’s poisonous and doesn’t always work. What will science uncover tomorrow about the nature of cancer and the relationship between radiation and cancerous cells? Tomorrow we may me reprobating the irradiation of our bodies as a ‘cure’ for anything. It may simply be the case that radiation has a deleterious effect on cancerous cells a percentage of the time for reasons as yet unknown giving the impression that it is a valid treatment. Now, all that being said, there is something else to consider before abandoning the system altogether. At the time, there was no understanding of the nature of VD (today we’re still working on it and likely haven’t got many more answers comparatively although we think we do). Our options as a society are limited not only by our state of understanding, but also by our responsibility to at least try. The question becomes simple. Do we allow people to suffer and close down the hospitals because we do not yet have perfect knowledge (assuming for a moment that we ever would)? Do we stop treatment of cancer with chemotherapy and offer no treatment because science can only see a correlation and does not understand the causative relationship between the ailments we suffer from and the cures that they cause us to suffer with? Just some food for thought…