Don’t
fret. I have as much interest in writing about cars running on water or Coca
Cola as Veena Malik has in wearing anything that is full length. There’s
already been a
surfeit of articles by physicists, engineers and even satirists weighing in
on the matter and declaring that our man from a Sindh polytechnic institute is
a fraud.
Instead,
there are two related issues that press me to refer to the water car that has
seized the imagination of the nation: how much we know about things and causal
paths and the purported causal link between the water-kit guy’s claim and our
supposed non-scientific thinking, owed, ostensibly, to religion.
In
January this year, Jonah Lehrer wrote a piece in Wired magazine, captioned, “Trials
and Errors: Why Science is Failing Us”. His story opens on the morning of
November 30, 2006 when “executives at Pfizer… held a meeting with investors at
the firm’s research centre in Groton, Connecticut. Jeff Kindler, then CEO of
Pfizer… was most excited about a new drug called torcetrapib, which had
recently entered Phase III clinical trials, the last step before filing for FDA
approval. He confidently declared that torcetrapib would be ‘one of the most
important compounds of our generation’”.
Lehrer
says that “Kindler’s enthusiasm was understandable: The potential market for
the drug was enormous. Like Pfizer’s blockbuster medication, Lipitor…
torcetrapib was designed to tweak the cholesterol pathway… [and] block a
protein that converts HDL cholesterol into its more sinister sibling, LDL. In
theory, this would cure our cholesterol problems, creating a surplus of the
good stuff and a shortage of the bad. In his presentation, Kindler noted that
torcetrapib had the potential to ‘redefine cardiovascular treatment’”.
“There
was a vast amount of research behind Kindler’s bold proclamations. The
cholesterol pathway is one of the best-understood biological feedback systems
in the human body…. Furthermore, torcetrapib had already undergone a small
clinical trial, which showed that the drug could increase HDL and decrease LDL.
Kindler told his investors that, by the second half of 2007, Pfizer would begin
applying for approval from the FDA. The success of the drug seemed like a sure
thing.
“And
then, just two days later, on December 2, 2006, Pfizer issued a stunning
announcement: The torcetrapib Phase III clinical trial was being terminated.
Although the compound was supposed to prevent heart disease, it was actually
triggering higher rates of chest pain and heart failure and a 60 per cent
increase in overall mortality. The drug appeared to be killing people.
“That
week, Pfizer’s value plummeted by $21 billion.
“The
story of torcetrapib is a tale of mistaken causation. Pfizer was operating on
the assumption that raising levels of HDL cholesterol and lowering LDL would
lead to a predictable outcome: Improved cardiovascular health. Less arterial
plaque. Cleaner pipes. But that didn’t happen….
“[The]
assumption — that understanding a system’s constituent parts means we also
understand the causes within the system—is not limited to the pharmaceutical
industry or even to biology. It defines modern science. In general, we believe
that the so-called problem of causation can be cured by more information, by
our ceaseless accumulation of facts. Scientists refer to this process as
reductionism. By breaking down a process, we can see how everything fits
together; the complex mystery is distilled into a list of ingredients. … Every
year, nearly $100 billion is invested in biomedical research in the US, all of
it aimed at teasing apart the invisible bits of the body. We assume that these
new details will finally reveal the causes of illness, pinning our maladies on
small molecules and errant snippets of DNA. Once we find the cause, of course,
we can begin working on a cure.” (For the full article see “>here).
Perhaps
physics is more accurate in its determination of causal pathways. I don’t know.
What I do know remotely, and in no systematic way, is that much in hard
sciences has continued to change. Nature has a way of surprising us. But quite
apart from this, the interesting aspect of the current controversy is the
debate, if it can be called that, among the scientists and the rancour that
shines through all of it. If physics — or is this related to chemistry: I’ll be
damned if I knew — is as accurate as it is supposed to be, then the fraud
should be easy to detect through the established scientific methods. Why
the controversy?
The
second aspect is even more interesting. If it is accepted that this fraud and
the lack of understanding of science it manifests has to do with our irrational
thinking begot of our supposed religiosity, then how does one explain a rather
long list of scientific misconduct and fraud from China to Germany to Denmark
to Great Britain to The Netherlands to Japan to Norway to you-name-it? Google
it for yourself.
The
question is important since we are on the issue of causality and the laws of
thermo- and whatnotdynamics. The assertion that our Sindhi engineer has done
what he has because of our national distaste for rationality, which is somehow
a result of our collective sense of religiosity, doesn’t come across to me as a
particularly impressive scientific method in determining causality especially
when it comes with a condescendingly triumphant ‘case-closed’ attitude.
Just
like it would be unscientific to challenge the supposedly immutable laws of
thermodynamics, it seems to me to be rather unscientific to declare such linear
causality to lead to a water-kit when one is dealing with human beings that,
unlike the laws of thermodynamics, are not immutable and prone to doing things
for reasons that range from the sublime to the ridiculous.
It
is fashionable, of course, to do so but since when did the season’s
pret-a-porter become the scientific method? Stupidity and fraudulent behaviour
remain as much a property of the secular world as they were, and remain, of the
religious one.
But
then we can move from stressing
the scientific method in one area to flouting it in another because that makes
good copy and serves politico-ideological agendas. The Laws of
Politicodynamics be praised!
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