Science Under Siege

Science Under Siege,
by Michael Mann
and Peter Hotez.

I recently finished reading Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World, by Michael Mann and Peter Hotez. Mann is a climate scientist and Hotez develops vaccines. Both have been active in the fight against antiscience. Readers of this blog may recall my review of Hotez’s previous book The Deadly Rise of Antiscience. The authors state their purpose in the final paragraph of their preface.

In Science Under Siege we seek to provide a succinct yet detailed delineation of the five forces behind the modern-day antiscience movement (the five p’s, as we call them—the plutocrats, the petrostates, the pros, the propagandists, and our press). We draw upon our respective experiences on two different fronts of the war on science to identify and delineate the drivers and their financial backers. We provide a road map for dismantling the antiscience machine, through stories that at times are quite personal but speak to challenges and threats that are broad and sweeping. This book is a warning. But it is also a call to arms. While there is urgency—unlike any we’ve ever known—there is still agency. We can still avert disaster if we can understand the nature of the mounting antiscience threat and formulate a strategy to counter it.

In their first chapter they write

We find ourselves facing not just a one-two punch of pandemics and the climate crisis, but a one-two-three punch, with that third punch, antiscience, obstructing the needed response from governments and civil society. The future of humankind and the health of our planet now depend on surmounting the dark forces of antiscience.

My favorite chapter was their last one, titled “The Path Forward.” They present a Venn diagram for winning the war against antiscience.

 

About it they write

One circle describes ways to expand the visibility of scientists, while providing the tools for scientists to better engage with the public. Another characterizes efforts to protect scientists. And the remaining circle emphasizes the battle against the intensifying flow of antiscience disinformation. We propose a framework for accomplishing this tripartite mission.

I’m going to adopt this Venn diagram as a guide for my future posts. 1) I will continue to communicate constructively about Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, but in addition I’ll stress how important science is in our society and oppose the forces of antiscience. I also will try to fulfill this role in my “Bob Park’s What’s New” series that I also publish weekly here. 2) I will search out and attempt to debunk and defeat disinformation. I’ve been trying to do this all along, but this goal is more urgent now. 3) I’ll support scientists. I can’t do much to support them financially or materially, but in this blog I can take on the role of cheerleader-in-chief and provide moral support, especially to those who are attacked by the forces of antiscience.

Mann and Hotez adopt a strident and pugnacious tone in Science Under Siege. Is it justified? It is. I truly believe that there is a Republican War on Science. I believe the forces of antiscience are currently winning this war. And I am certain we must oppose antiscience with all our resources. Particularly as a retired scientist, I have an obligation to fight antiscience for the sake of the next generation of scientists. And as a new grandfather, I must oppose antiscience for the sake of my grandson and all the others of his generation.

I’m going to end by repeating some inspiring words that Mann and Hotez feature. They’re from a commentary in the Journal of Virology titled “The Harms of Promoting the Lab Leak Hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 Origins Without Evidence” (Volume 98, Article Number e01240–24, 2024). I suggest you read the entire article (it’s not long), but below is the excerpt Mann and Hotez quote.

Science is humanity’s best insurance against threats from nature, but it is a fragile enterprise that must be nourished and protected. What is now happening to virology is a stark demonstration of what is happening to all of science. It will come to affect every aspect of science in a negative and possibly dangerous way, as has already happened with climate science. It is the responsibility of scientists, research institutions, and scientific organizations to push back against the anti-virology attacks, because what we are seeing now may be the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Book Talk: Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez — Science Under Siege

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-foS1FIkK3g

John Clarke Shares the Nobel Prize in Physics

John Clarke
UC Berkeley, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

This year the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John M. Martinis “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantization in an electric circuit.”

I will focus on one member of this trio, John Clarke. Russ Hobbie and I mention Clarke in Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology in our chapter on biomagnetism.

Sensitive detectors are constructed from superconducting materials. Some compounds, when cooled below a certain critical temperature, undergo a sudden transition and their electrical resistance falls to zero. A current in a loop of superconducting wire persists for as long as the wire is maintained in the superconducting state. The reason there is a superconducting state is a well-understood quantum-mechanical effect that we cannot go into here. It is due to the cooperative motion of many electrons in the superconductor (Eisberg and Resnick 1985, Sect. 14.1; Clarke 1994). The [line integral of the electric field] around a superconducting ring is zero, which means that [the change in magnetic flux] is zero, and the magnetic flux through a superconducting loop cannot change. If one tries to change the magnetic field with some external source, the current in the superconducting circuit changes so that the flux remains the same.

The detector is called a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID). The operation of a SQUID and biological applications are described in the Scientific American article by Clarke (1994).

This was not the first Nobel Prize related to the SQUID. In 1973 Brian Josephson shared the Nobel Prize “for his theoretical predictions of the properties of a supercurrent through a tunnel barrier, in particular those phenomena which are generally known as the Josephson effects.” Now, over fifty years later, it’s Clarke’s turn.

A Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory announcement stated

Clarke joined Berkeley Lab in 1969 and retired as a faculty senior scientist in the Materials Sciences Division in 2010. At the time of their prize-winning research, Martinis worked as a graduate student researcher, and Devoret as a postdoctoral scholar, in the Clarke group at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley…. 

[Clarke’s circuit using a tunnel barrier] is the foundation for an ultrasensitive detector called a SQUID or a superconducting quantum interference device. Clarke has pioneered and used SQUIDs in many applications, including detection of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) signals at ultralow frequencies; geophysics; nondestructive evaluation of materials; biosensors; detection of dark matter; and observing qubits, the fundamental unit of information in a quantum computer.

Clarke describes his first SQUID-like circuit in his Scientific American article that Russ and I cite.

In my early days as a research student at Cambridge, my supervisor, Brian Pippard, proposed that I use a SQUID to make a highly sensitive voltmeter. In those days, procedures for making Josephson junctions were in their infancy and not practicable for manufacturing instruments. One day early in 1965, over the traditional afternoon tea at the Cavendish Laboratory, I was discussing this problem with Paul C. Wraight, a fellow student. He suggested that a molten blob of solder (an alloy of lead and tin that becomes superconducting in liquid helium) deposited onto a niobium wire might just conceivably make a Josephson junction. His rationale was that niobium has a native oxide layer that might behave as a suitable tunnel barrier.

We rushed back to the laboratory, begged a few inches of niobium wire from a colleague, melted a blob of solder onto it, attached some leads and lowered it into liquid helium. As we hoped, Josephson tunneling! The fact that Wraight’s idea worked the first time was important. If it had not, we would never have bothered to try again. Because of its appearance, we christened the device the SLUG. Later I was able to make a voltmeter that could measure 10 femtovolts (10^-14 volt), an improvement over conventional semiconductor voltmeters by a factor of 100,000.

Clarke’s article goes on to describe many of the biological applications of SQUIDs, including for measuring the magnetocardiogram (magnetic field of the heart) and the magnetoencephalogram (magnetic field of the brain).

Congratulations to John Clarke and this colleagues on their Nobel Prize. It’s another wonderful example of physics applied to biology and medicine. 

UC Berkeley press conference 10/7/2025: Professor Emeritus John Clarke 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnL-1VTSp7s

The Physics of Hearing

Physics of the Body.

My hearing is not what it used to be. It’s not terrible now; I still get along okay. But I find myself asking my wife “what?” a lot. So, I borrowed a copy of Physics of the Body—by John Cameron, James Skofronick, and Roderick Grant (1999)— and read Section 11.9: Deafness and Hearing Aids. It covers much of the information that Russ Hobbie and I discuss in Chapter 13 of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, and more. Below I quote a paragraph from Physics of the Body, with references removed and my comments in brackets.

In 1985 it was estimated that 21 million persons in the United States were either deaf or hard of hearing. The frequency range most important for understanding conversational speech is from about 250 to 3000 Hz. [The figure below shows the hearing response curve for a young adult from IPMB, with the range from 0.25 to 3 kHz shaded.] A person who is “deaf” above 4000 Hz but who has normal hearing in the speech frequencies is not considered deaf or even hard of hearing. [I was taking a walk with my daughter Kathy a few months ago. As we passed one house she grimaced said “what is that terrible high-pitched noise?” I said “what noise?”] However, that person should not spend a lot of money on good stereo equipment. [Music sounds the same now as I remember it back when I was a teenager. Nevertheless, I need no additional encouragement to not spend money; I’m a cheapskate.] Hearing handicaps are classified according to the average hearing threshold at 500, 1000, and 2000 Hz in the better ear [I haven’t noticed any difference between my left and right ears]. A person with a hearing threshold 30 dB above normal would probably not have a hearing problem. People with hearing thresholds of 90 dB are considered deaf or stone deaf. [According to Table 13.1 in IPMB, 30 dB is the “maximum background sound level tolerable in a broadcast studio” and 90 dB is the sound “inside a motor bus.” I am definitely not stone deaf. Is my threshold below 30 dB? I don’t know.] About 1% of the population have thresholds for speech frequencies greater than 55 dB [IPMB says 55 dB is between “office” sounds and “speech at 1 m.” I definitely can hear speech at 1 m. It’s speech from my wife calling from another room that I have trouble with.] and should use hearing aids [Both my mom and dad used hearing aids when they got older. My health has generally parallels my father’s. I fear it is just a matter of time]. About 1.7% have a slight hearing handicap; they have problems with normal speech but have no difficulty with loud speech [I think I am better than that]. Hearing problems increase with age [Yes, that’s the problem. I’m getting old.]

The average sound level of speech is about 60 dB. We adjust the sound level of our speech unconsciously according to the noise level of our surroundings. Speech sound levels in a quiet room may be as low as 45 dB; at a noisy party they may be 90 dB. A person with a hearing loss of 45 dB in the 500 to 2000 Hz range may do all right (hearing-wise) at a cocktail party but hear very little of speech in a quiet room. [I don’t know. It seems to me that I have more of a problem distinguishing speech from background sounds than just hearing speech. I suspect I would do worse at the cocktail party even with people speaking at 90 dB than chatting at 45 dB in the quiet room.]

Now that I’m on Medicare, my wife is encouraging me to have my hearing checked. I suppose I should.

Trident Production

The Study of
Elementary Particles
by the Photographic
Method.

In the 5th edition of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, Russ Hobbie and I include two figures showing particle tracks in photographic emulsions: Fig. 15.27, tracks of 22 MeV alpha particles; and Fig. 15.28, tracks of an electron-positron pair. Both figures are reproduced from The Study of Elementary Particles by the Photographic Method. When preparing the 6th edition of IPMB, I obtained a copy of that book through interlibrary loan.

The book is fascinating. It was published in 1959, the year before I was born. All three coauthors are British, and are famous enough to have Wikipedia pages. Cecil Frank Powell was a particle physicist who received the Nobel Prize in 1950 for developing the photographic method for studying nuclear processes, and for using this method to discover the pion. He was trained at the Cavendish Laboratory working with Rutherford. He died in 1969. Peter Howard Fowler was a student of Powell’s who worked on cosmic radiation. He was a radar officer with the Royal Air Force during World War II, and was able to detect German radar jamming and identify its source, leading to a destruction of the responsible German radar station. He was married to physicist Rosemary Fowler, who discovered the kaon. His grandfather was Ernest Rutherford. Fowler died in 1996. Donald Hill Perkins discovered the negative pion. He studied proton decay, and found early evidence of neutrino oscillations. Perkins and Fowler were the first to suggest using pion beams as therapy for cancer in 1961 (The use of pions in medicine hasn't panned out). Perkins died at the ripe old age of 97 in 2022.

When skimming through the book, I noticed an interesting illustration of a trident track produced by high energy electrons. It looks something like this: 

A trident arises from the process of bremsstrahlung followed by pair production; both of which are described in IPMB. A fast electron interacts with an atomic nucleus, decelerating the electron and emitting a bremsstrahlung photon. This photon, if it has high enough energy, can then interact with an atomic nucleus to create an electron-positron pair. The intermediate photon can be “virtual,” existing only fleetingly. The end result is three particles: the original electron plus the pair. I gather that this requires a very high energy electron, and its cross-section is small, so it seems to contribute little to the dose in medical physics. The authors talk about the production of tridents for energies of more than a BeV, which is an old-fashioned way of saying a GeV, equivalent to 1000 MeV.

I’m glad Russ and I included figures from The Study of Elementary Particles by the Photographic Method. I hope I can figure out the permissions situation (the authors are all dead, and the publisher was sold to another company) and we can continue to include the figures in the 6th edition.