Everyone loves the NCAA Tournament.
Some people love it more than others (here's lookin' at you, Gus Johnson!), but everyone loves it. You see, the great thing about the NCAA Tournament is that it picks a winner every time. It's clean, and it's simple-64 games, 63 losers, one winner.
It's like the old adage goes: You can count on four things in life-you'll be born, you'll pay your taxes, one team will win the NCAA Tournament every year and you'll die.
Now think about science. No one loves science except scientists.
Science is the anti-NCAA Tournament. There's never anything simple about it.
Complexity is in the very nature of science. When you're a scientist or a physician, you can never prove a fact. Instead, you demonstrate results that suggest the truth of a certain fact, and then you show that there's a less than 5 percent chance that your results occurred due to random chance. (I know, boooring!)
The upshot of this is that non-scientists appear much more certain than scientists and physicians.
Jenny McCarthy says, "Give [my son] mumps and measles! I'll take that over autism any day!" on an episode of "Larry King Live" dedicated to the "controversy" that vaccines cause autism.
Science replies in a paper dense with, well, science: "This study provides strong evidence against association of autism with persistent [measles virus] RNA in the GI tract or MMR exposure."
If scientists ran the NCAA Tournament, they wouldn't play 64 games televised on CBS to an audience of millions with the winner moving on to the next round.
Instead, they'd play each game over and over again until they could demonstrate that one team would win the majority of the games played with 95 percent certainty that the results of the contests were not due to random chance. Then, they'd publish a dense statement in an overpriced magazine with miniscule circulation indicating that their results show that, given the results of the basketball trial performed, it is highly likely that Duke University possesses a superior basketball team compared to that of the University of North Carolina, and therefore it might be prudent to promote them to the next round of the tournament; however, better information could be attained by designing a better basketball trial.
No one would watch that tournament, and only partly because it would last like 10 million years.
People don't think like scientists. People like simple answers; scientists don't believe that there are simple answers.
This normally isn't a problem, because most people aren't scientists. Unfortunately, sometimes scientists figure out important things that people should know about.
One of these things is vaccines-they save lives and don't cause autism; that's as close to a fact as you can get in science. Another of these things is that global warming is happening, right now.
It's not Jenny McCarthy's fault that she says things like, "I believe that parents' anecdotal information is science-based information." She is not a scientist; she's an aggrieved parent searching for answers.
But because of the vaccine-autism "controversy," illnesses that no one has gotten in years are coming back. More than 130 cases of measles were reported in the first half of 2008.
It's easy, as someone who knows about science, to sit there and tell non-scientists that they're cretins who just don't get it. But that's not the answer.
If there's one thing that a year and a half of med school has taught me, it's that scientists just don't know how to talk to regular people. They've spent so long talking in science-speak that it's the only language they speak.
So the answer is to translate. If getting a complex and nuanced answer is so important, then play every game of the science NCAA tournament 10,000 times to determine the better team, but report the result on ESPN and in words that everyone understands: "Duke basketball is better than UNC basketball"; "Vaccines do not cause autism"; "Global warming will kill us all."
No one will ever love science like they love the NCAA Tournament, but if science can be presented the right way, they might learn to care just as much.
Alex Fanaroff, Trinity '07, is a second-year medical student. His column runs every other Thursday.
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