Enriched with advanced BS

First appeared in the Evening Star, Ipswich, October 26, 2007

YOU know those moments in Star Trek when a senior crew member has to “explain” something inexplicable or bizarre?

You get a sentence or two of dialogue including words like “isomiotic hypo”, “optical transducer” or “matrix diodes”.

It's there to give the impression that something is scientific, advanced, the product of cleverer minds than yours. You're not meant to understand it – just to be impressed and reassured.

The scriptwriters, like those of any other series, are really mostly concerned with people and their emotions. At such moments in the story they simply insert the word “tech” in the script and leave it to the specialists to provide the elegant gibberish.

Which, I suspect, is exactly what goes on in the offices of product manufacturers of all kinds.

What do you make of it when you read on a label that a shampoo is “enriched with satin proteins” or that its “new formula” contains “pro-B5, PP and a derivative of vitamin E”?

That a food supplement “maintains homocysteines”? That a toothpaste employs “advanced cleaning silicas”?

If a stain-remover boasts of “oxi-action”, does that mean it breathes? Does a detergent announced as “aromatherapy for your clothes” induce psychological well-being in your wardrobe?

Salesmen 150 years ago and more were peddling tinctures, liniments and salves they claimed cured everything from boils to your bowels. But the barrage of mumbo-jumbo is more all-pervasive now than ever.

Shampoos all seem to be “enriched” with something or other, all in the cause of enriching the manufacturers and their shareholders.

I've often wondered how real scientists feel about all this pseudo-science. And now I know.

Physicist Carolyn Tregidgo says: “Bad science gives all scientists a bad name and undermines the work we do.”

Meanwhile biologist Kehinde Ross is concerned about “the unscrupulous development” of products “with little or no scientific evidence to support their claims”.

Both are among a group of young scientists behind the project There Goes The Science Bit. You can find the results of their inquiries – some hilarious, some downright scary – on the website senseaboutscience.org.uk

The researchers set out to challenge the scientific claims made by a number of manufacturers of health products. And guess what?

They found an awful lot of that old formula politely known as BS.

Now is that something you'd like to swallow, wash in or rub into your skin?