Science journal tries to understand misinformation

The November 1, 2024 issue of Science contains three articles on misinformation in science. The articles tend to concentrate on the standard examples such as vaccine misinformation but there's another kind of misinformation that's just as important. I'm talking about scientific misinformation that's spread by journals like Science and Nature.

Do any of you remember the arsenic affair? That's when science accepted a paper by Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her collaborators claiming that they isolated a bacterium that substituted arsenic for phosphorus in its DNA. The paper was published online and was severely criticized after a ridiculous NASA press conference. It was eventually refuted when Rosie Redfield and others looked closely at the bacterial DNA and showed that it did not contain arsenic. The paper has still not been retracted. [See Reviewing the "Arseniclife" Paper.]

And let's not forget the massive misinformation campaign associated with the publication of ENCODE results in 2012.

Here's what Elizabeth Pennisi wrote in early September 2012.

This week, 30 research papers, including six in Nature and additional papers published by Science, sound the death knell for the idea that our DNA is mostly littered with useless bases. A decade long project, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE), has found that 80% of the human genome serves some purpose, biochemically speaking. “"I don’t think anyone would have anticipated even close to the amount of sequence that ENCODE has uncovered that looks like it has functional importance,"” says John A. Stamatoyannopoulos, an ENCODE re searcher at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Beyond defining proteins, the DNA bases highlighted by ENCODE specify landing spots for proteins that influence gene activity, strands of RNA with myriad roles, or simply places where chemical modifi cations serve to silence stretches of our chromosomes. These result are going “to change the way a lot of [genomics] concepts are written about and presented in textbooks,” Stamatoyannopoulos predicts.

[see Science Writes Eulogy for Junk DNA]

This is not the only example of misinformation being spread by Elizabeth Pennisi. She has a long history of misrepresenting work on the human genome by publishing articles in Science about the dark matter of the genome and the mysterious lack of genes. For example, she is the author of a 2005 article on Why Do Humans Have So Few Genes? where she perpetuates the myth that knowledgeable scientists were surprised to discover that humans have fewer than 30,000 genes. She promotes the standard excuses that attempt to explain why humans can be more complex than a nematode or a plant when they all have about the same number of genes: alternative splicing, complex regulation, lots of non-coding genes.

Pennisi is not the only one who writes misleading articles for Science but she's the one who has done the most to spread misinformation in the field of genomics and molecular biology.

Let's be clear about one thing. When I accuse her of spreading misinformation it's not just because she has a different opinion than I do. I think she's wrong but that's not the point. The point is that she completely misrepresents the field by ignoring all the scientists who don't agree with her. She deliberately gives the false impression that she's fairly presenting the consensus view on these subjects and she's doing it in a highly respected journal.

Science (and Nature) have recently been clutching their pearls about the spread of science misinformation. It would be nice if they could own up to their own part in this fiasco and take steps to police their science writers. It would be nice if they could find a way to tighten up their peer review process to prevent the spread of more misinformation.

I admit to a bit of bitterness and self-interest here. It would have been nice to see my book reviewed in either of those journals.

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