Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [81]
Cynics will say that most people aren’t smart or interested enough to make a contribution to science. I believe that projects such as Galaxy Zoo and Foldit show those cynics are wrong. Most people are plenty smart enough to make a contribution to science, and many of them are interested. All that’s lacking are tools that help connect them to the scientific community in ways that let them make that contribution. Today, we can build those tools.
Changing the Role of Science in Society
After Jonas Salk announced his polio vaccine in 1955 it was quickly pressed into widespread use in the rich developed countries, and polio rates plummeted. But in developing countries it was a different story. In 1988, roughly 350,000 people in the developing world became infected with polio. In that year the World Health Organization (WHO) decided to launch a global initiative to wipe out the disease. They made quick progress, and in 2003 there were only 784 new cases worldwide, most concentrated in just a few countries. Worst hit was Nigeria, where nearly half (355) of the new cases occurred. WHO decided to launch a major vaccination program in Nigeria, but the initiative was blocked by political and religious leaders in three northern Nigerian states—Kano, Zamfara, and Kaduna—with a total population of 18 million people. Leaders in those states warned that the vaccines could be contaminated with agents causing HIV/AIDS and infertility, and told parents they should not allow their children to be vaccinated. The government of Kano described their opposition to vaccinations as “a lesser of two evils, to sacrifice two, three, four, five even ten children to polio [rather] than allow hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of girl-children likely to be rendered infertile.” The leader of the powerful Kano State Sharia Supreme Council said the polio vaccines were “corrupted and tainted by evildoers from America and their Western allies.” Vaccinations were suspended in Kano, and a new polio outbreak occurred, spreading to eight neighboring countries, and eventually causing 1,500 children to become paralyzed.
Polio vaccination is far from the only issue where good science doesn’t necessarily lead to good public health outcomes. In the United Kingdom, use of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine dropped sharply in the early 2000s after a 1998 paper in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet suggested the vaccine might cause autism in children. (The paper’s methodology was flawed, and it was later retracted by the journal and most of the authors). The supposed vaccine-autism link became a topic of great public controversy in the UK, with Prime Minister Tony Blair publicly supporting the vaccine, but refusing to confirm whether his son Leo had been vaccinated. The vaccination rate dropped from 92 percent to 80 percent. That may sound like a small drop, but the number of measles cases jumped dramatically, rising seventeen-fold over just a few years. To understand why the increase in measles was so dramatic—and therefore why a drop in vaccination rates is such a big deal—notice that the fraction of people not being vaccinated rose from 8 percent to 20 percent. Roughly speaking, that meant that someone infected with measles would be exposed to two and a half times as many susceptible people as before. And if any of those people caught measles, they would, in turn, be exposed to two and a half times as many susceptible people as