Sinister bid to silence science
Remarks: Dr Dalia Nield made comments regarding a breast cream called 'Boob Job' in the Mail last month. Now the company that make it is trying to silence experts' criticism
Let's be clear about this; the very basis of science is the ability to say ‘No, you are wrong’ without fear or hindrance.
That is how science progresses – by discovering new things and pouring cold water on old certainties. If it starts to be seen as defamatory to contradict a claim, then the very heart of scientific inquiry, not to mention basic freedom of speech, is under threat.
Last year, the science writer Simon Singh was sued by the British Chiropractic Association after pointing to the lack of evidence for some of the claims made by its practitioners.
After a storm of protest, the case was dropped, but not before Dr Singh had suffered months of stress wondering if he was going to lose his house and everything he owned if the courts found against him.
Because England’s laws are so generous to litigants, ‘libel tourists’ who feel they have been wronged in newspapers and scientific journals use the fact that these publications are usually published in English online (and hence ‘published’ here) to cash in and silence criticism at the same time.
My view (go on, sue me) is that chiropractic is based on some pretty shaky evidence. As to the Boob Job cream, it sounds like an utterly shameless rip-off.
Sadly, our libel laws are being used even by ‘respectable’ institutions that want critics silenced.
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Dr Peter Wilmshurst, a consultant cardiologist at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, is being sued by American company NMT Medical for voicing concerns about some of NMT’s research.
NMT recently threatened to sue Dr Wilmshurst a second time for going on Radio 4’s Today programme last year to talk about his case.
Ornithological charity the RSPB, meanwhile, is currently being sued by two conservationists, Gordon and Christine Bowker, for criticising their scientific research on population decline in black grouse.
And a Portuguese professor of linguistics, Francisco Lacerda, was sued by Nemesysco, a lie detector manufacturer, after he wrote a peer-reviewed paper in an international journal suggesting that their machines do not work.
Storm of protest: A case against Simon Singh was dropped through lack of evidence after he made claims against chiropractors
Professor Lacerda works in Sweden; the lie detectors are made in Israel. But it was English libel laws that were used to try to silence him, in what Dr Singh has called the ‘global chill’ caused by our legal system.
Worse, because the most insidious form of censorship is self-censorship, editors of the leading scientific journals now consult their lawyers for every edition and some have rejected papers they would otherwise want to publish.
Scientific disputes are not matters for the courts. If I wish to say your potion does not work I should be free to do so, even if it turns out that I am wrong.
The irony is, of course, that by reaching for their lawyers these people have massively increased the likelihood that you will read about the debates and conclude, in all probability, that Boob Job sounds like a waste of money.
It is called the law of unintended consequences; a law which holds true whatever nonsense is peddled in court or written on a bottle of snake oil.
