Prove It?

Madeleine L’Engle wrote, “The deepest scientific truths cannot be expressed directly,” and I have to wonder if that’s because there may not be any scientific truths.

Cynical, I know, but just today, I mentioned to Dennis that a certain someone, a bigwig with a pharmaceutical company, reportedly died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is essentially Mad Cow. This little news item was followed by an insinuation about the relationship between Creutzfeldt and Kuru, which is known as a “slow virus” that affected members of a particular African tribe. In fact, Kuru is reportedly so slow that it takes 30 to 40 years or more for symptoms to appear. What causes Kuru, you ask? Eating the brains of your recently departed ancestors.

No worries; I shan’t expand further on that. I simply wish to make a point, which is this: there is a whole host of problems with the research surrounding Kuru and “slow viruses,” to say nothing of the political situation surrounding an “outbreak” of Mad Cow Disease in Britain in 1996. Yet, despite the questions, unorthodox research, monetary and political incentives involved in these spurious diseases, the notion of “slow viruses,” which was put forth by the fellow that “identified” Kuru, has been used to explain such conditions as AIDS and cervical cancer. Oh, yes, they were also the foot in the door for any number of drugs and vaccines and astronomical amounts of money in the form of government grants.

So, you see, it may not even be a question of whether a scientific truth can be expressed directly, but more a question of if it even needs to be coherently expressed at all.