The Raoul Moat Saga

Ever since the tragic events of the 3rd and 10th of July, newspapers, politicians and all entities that one could ascribe the "establishment" label to in any regard have been scathing in their vilification of Raoul Moat. In fairness, as far as anyone can be called a villian; he can. However, the lack of sympathy being shown and the lack of understanding of those who show sympathy is appalling.

To quote the most establishment figure one can find, the Rt. Hon. David Cameron

“I cannot understand any wave, however small, of public sympathy for this man. There should be sympathy for his victims and the havoc he wreaked in that community.” 

So, David, let me try to enlighten you why some people feel sympathy for a killer. There are a few reasons why people do this.

First of all, we must remember that Moat's life story covered miles of news pages and the story had twenty four hour coverage on television. It pervaded the everyday lives of people. Once people saw his background, his breakdown and his kids it became a whole lot easier to humanise him. The word "monster" is used too often by the media to label people, and people readily latch onto it for paedophiles. It's easy to call up images of trolls or other hideous beasts and put paedophiles in the same category as them. In fact it's easy to put any group of people in that category as long as you don't know them. That's basically where racism comes from. Knowing people doesn't necessarily lead to complete understanding, but it does lead to a little understanding and a little sympathy.

Secondly, people are conditioned to root for the underdog. Whether in sports or in life; when someone is facing nigh impossible odds, ninety-nice times out of a hundred the neutral spectator wants the underdog to win for it to be dramatic. Such conditioning has been achieved through years of Hollywood movies where the hero overcomes the forces of the entire universe to rescue the treasure and/or girl. There's a plethora of glorified convicts on the the run from the law in our collective psyche; Ned Kelly, Butch Cassidy, even Robin Hood for crying out loud. Regardless of his crimes, when the faceless state brings all of its draconian powers to bear on one individual, the natural inclination of people is to cheer for the little guy.

Thirdly, the manner of his death. It was a tragedy. Any death is. Worse than that, it was a tragedy which many see as have being preventable. The police had Moat surrounded for over five hours before he shot himself. I'm going to bet I'm not the only one thinking that some form of tranquillizer or something could have been used to bring him in peacefully. I'm sure the police officers did the best they could, but the feeling still remains.

Lastly, someone died. It is perfectly natural to feel sympathy when someone dies, regardless of whether you know the person or not. People should be celebrating the fact that we are able to feel sympathy for killers. Empathising and sympathising with other people is what gels society. A lack of empathy and sympathy is what makes it possible for people to commit violent crime. We feel sympathy, thus we have not turned into the animal during the hunt.

So rather than condemning the sympathy, we should try to understand it and focus it on the positives. The messages being sent out by the Prime Minister and the rest of the establishment only serves to divide the state further from people and hardly serves the purpose of building Mr. Cameron's "Big Society".

A Prescription for Panic

It took 12 full years, but two months ago, the Lancet finally retracted the paper of Wakefield et al. which drew a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The damage the hysteria surrounding the paper caused can be seen in graph below that I plundered from the BBC. There was a noticeable drop in the uptake of the vaccine, which unsurprisingly lead to a spike in the cases of measles in the population.

I'm not going to go into the medical and statistical faults of the study (I'm not a medcine-type-guy and talking statistics bores normal people), but suffice to say that the link was tenuous and the science sketchy at best. The problem wasn't with the science. The Lancet always publishes controversial articles on the edges of science. In medicine in particular, it is necessary to generate debate to ensure the safety of both new and established treatments. The problem was how it was jumped upon by the press. That wasn't helped by Wakefield holding a press conference upon the paper's publication. Over 1500 articles were published on the alleged MMR-autism link over the following few years despite many large studies which proved no link.

Is it the media's fault for jumping on a story? In a word; no. Science is published in journals in a manner that is not easily accessible to the public. It takes the researchers and/or the media departments in their universities to start stirring the shit. Aside from MMR, probably the most famous example of this is Peter Duesberg. Duesberg is an expert in cancer causing genes. However, he is best known for a very public campaign decrying the link between HIV and AIDS. While some debate on the origins of AIDS was acceptable in the 80's, Duesberg still espouses his views and is considered a major influence on former South African president Thabo Mbeki. Duesberg sat on an advisory panel to Mbeki and the South African government's subsequent failure to provide antiretroviral drugs is thought to have cost thousands of lives. 

How did Duesberg get into this position? He used his right as a member of the National Academy of Sciences to publish a paper without peer review, by-passing the usual crap filter. Through this he was able to gain the credibility in the media to participate in debates on AIDS. Just as we are seeing with the global warming denialists, when there is a scientific debate of major impact going on, the media feel compelled to show all sides no matter how ridiculous they are. Then the crazy theory gets picked up by a political cause and from there it snowballs. Duesberg's theory was that AIDS was the result of environmental issues; large amounts of recreational drug use being paramount amongst them. This was desirable for those who wanted to stereotype the gay community as bringing AIDS upon themselves and also for cementing AIDS as the "gay plague". 

I for one would not expect any newspaper editor to be able to parse the science and divide the crap from the better theories. Even in the broadsheets that have specific science reporters, I wouldn't expect all of them to  be experts in immunology, general relativity, photonics, whatever the story is this week. The responsibility lies with the scientists themselves who are the best judge of the quality and validity of their own work. Unfortunately, scientific ethics is not taught to students in university. From my experience, the university is more interested in you producing something that they can release a catchy press statement about, with the university's name all over it in giant bold letters, naturally. 

Privately funded research is unsurprisingly not exempt from this either. In fact, the research that Wakefield's infamous MMR paper was based on was funded by solicitors representing parents who believed their children had been harmed by MMR. Conflict of interest much? At least he is now facing charges of professional misconduct for that (amongst other things). 

Simply, ethics needs to be highlighted much more in the training of scientists from all disciplines, not just the health sciences. Where there are the bad apples, the whole scientific community needs to come out strongly to shout them down. The Durban Declaration about AIDS in 2000 or the UN's IPCC reports on global warming are good examples of the scientific community doing what it should.