Phrenology — a long disproved pseudo-scientific discipline. Image taken from WikiCommons

In this blogpost, I take a pseudo-scientific “research article” and dissect it part-by part, to give an example of how scientific articles are read, and how all articles should be read, lest we fall pray to fake news.

“Phantom DNA” — When I first heard about it, I was understandingly confused, as despite spending the preceding five years studying genetics, I’d never encountered it. The term refers to a detectable field left over by DNA molecules in water, that remains even after the molecule has been removed. This sounded a bit unbelievable, but as I haven’t worked on that specific topic I couldn’t comment on it at the time, so I restrained my judgement.

The person introducing me to the concept mentioned that it was something brought up by a student of theirs, who wanted to do some lab experiment to test it out. They agreed to get me in contact with the student, as he promised to back up his claims by sending some research papers. I was anxiously expecting the students message, but when I clicked the first link in the email I was instantly disappointed. Turns out that “Phantom DNA” is pseudoscience, or as Trump would call it FAKE NEWS.

Before we get to the article in question, I’d like you to keep in mind that I am making a point here, and that this article is a very low hanging fruit on the pseudoscientific tree, but serves well to demonstrate some common issues found in pseudoscience, and pseudo-journalism as well. How did I know it was all a pile of lies? Well, after spending a certain time reading quality scientific papers, critiquing the authors work, and discussing research with your peers, you tend to develop a habit of subconsciously poking holes in anything you read, and this article was leaking pseudoscience everywhere.

The suspicious link: http://www.stealthskater.com/Documents/Consciousness_29.pdf

The paper describing it is hosted on a random website, not a scientific journal website. The point of publishing in scientific journals is that it is a very difficult process, which includes peer-review by competent experts in the field. It takes from a few months to a year (sometimes more), of a constant back and forth with reviewers to get an article published in a scientific journal. This process allows us to have some confidence that what we are reading is actual science, that has been scrutinized and verified as a valid contribution to it’s specific field, before being accepted for publication. The author doesn’t list an affiliation to a research institute — While independent researchers do exists, most science is done by large teams, affiliated with universities, scientific institutes or the occasional corporate entity. Author cites exclusively non-scientific journals — if you google “Journal of Scientific Exploration“ and open the contents of any issue you will see article titles such as “Sonic Analysis of the Redlands UFO Tape Recording“ or „Testing Telepathy in the Medium/Proxy-Sitter Dyad“ (these are literally the titles of their articles). This is clearly not a scientific journal, if you need further proof you can also see that it is not present in any scientific index (SCI, SCIE). Reputable (mostly established pre-internet era, and well known to the academic community) indexes help scientists separate “real” scientific journals, from non-reputable journals, and thus avoid basing their future research on possibly fraudulent data. “Sophisticated and expensive ‘MALVERN’ laser photon correlation spectrometer“ — researchers never mention how expensive their equipment is as it’s an unnecessary statement. You will NEVER hear a scientist saying things like „Using the very expensive qPCR machine, with the obscenely costly DNA sequencer“, unless they are writing specifically about lowering the cost of a scientific procedure (such as trying to reach a 100$ human genome sequencing procedure). Saying it’s expensive is just an authority building technique used to trick uninformed readers. No background and no valid references given in the introduction — Research articles use the introduction to provide some history, and a short review of actual research done prior to theirs and usually need a few pages to cover the background of a field, and introduce the reader to terms that are going to be used in latter sections. It is common to direct the reader to articles reviewing the field, and to cite relevant papers from major journals in this section, that the reader can use to get a better understanding of the topic at hand. “After duplicating this many times” — How many times is many? How much DNA was used? What volume of buffer was in the cuvettes? What wavelengths of light were used? Were the cuvettes reused? Were the „Phantom DNA“ cuvettes the ones that previously had DNA in them, or was it fresh DNA? Why weren’t any spectrometer tests done on the DNA to check whether there was any leftover DNA in the „phantom DNA“ tubes? Why weren’t additional tests done with different equipment? Why weren’t the „phantom DNA“ tubes stained by a DNA-binding dye to exclude the possibility of leftover DNA being in there?

This is necessary as an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence. Saying that DNA leaves a phantom DNA field behind it would need extensive, precise measurement, with a number of different, valid methods, with those methods being described in detail, so that other researchers can replicate the research, and confirm the results independently. The author here makes a grand statement with no evidence, no criticism of their own “results” and no attempts to challenge their own assertions, which is not how you do science.

All of these are questions that a researcher needs to answer, and are usually posed by either a senior colleague (PI, lab director, any senior scientist) or by the people reviewing the article prior to publication. If an article hasn’t been peer reviewed by relevant experts in the field (in these case you’d need physicists working in the field of optics, and molecular biologists to check the methods) then that article is not acceptable as science, as it isn’t following the scientific method. The Institute of Hearthmart — written on Figure 2 — a quick Google search shows that this is a new-age non-profit organization, not an actual research institute, they sell trinkets and promote gibberish, not science.

This is why scientists use PubMed and follow actual research journals and publishers such as OxfordJournals, PMC, Nature, etc, as that is where most “good” science gets published. Not on Facebook pages, blog posts and similar “news” sources because those are very susceptible to pseudoscience and other false news. Google Scholar, while allowing people access to a wide range of publications doesn’t discriminate between journals, so this “article”, and many other similar ones are available there.

This post is based on the actual reply I sent to that student, to convince them to be a more skeptical when reading things online. But reading it once more, I realize that you could apply a similar procedure to news articles, and we could even generalize a checklist of questions that a news item would need to answer before being considered “real news”.

Is it published by a reputable source? Do we know who the author is, and what are their affiliations? Has the author cited other articles, from quality sources? Are the claims made in the article specific, and are they verifiable?

If the average news consumer would make a habit of going through these steps then “fake news” would not be such a huge issue, as people would be more prepared to challenge the claims made online, and conclude for themselves whether someone is trying to dupe them. The topic of science fighting it’s own fake news, and the lessons learned there is covered more in the TEDx talk by Harun Šiljak, who partially inspired me to write this post.