Nick Bilton writes about wearables in the New York Times Style section. He’s not a journalist, he’s a commentator, and therefore no one expects him to be right about everything. But his latest op-ed, which purports to paint a picture of wearables—like Apple recently announced smartwatch—and claim that they could cause diseases as serious as cancer, is simply wrong. It’s not just overly cautious, nor intentionally provocative. It’s dangerous.
This article is not about Nick Bilton. This article is about science, and how conspiracy theorists like Bilton distort science to fabricate controversial ideas. The problem is not that Bilton believes that technology can cause diseases like cancer. That is an old hypothesis that only science should examine. The problem is that he based his argument on the most wonderful feature of the scientific method: uncertainty in the face of imperfect evidence. And that makes his essay a devastating attack on science itself.
Let's start with the fact that Bilton presents a "cautionary" story about the tobacco companies' scare campaigns to cover up the health effects of smoking in the 1940s. This distorted reference gives Bilton room to sow the seeds of conspiracy in the reader's mind. Bilton then talks to a doctor, best known for selling homeopathic remedies on her website. The doctor also writes about the dangers of cell phones, but has never published any real research on the subject.
The author has just managed to open a small hollow hole of doubt, which he fills with misinterpretations or “bad science”. Bilton supports his thesis on a few examples suggesting that mobile phones can cause cancer. He states that the most important of these is the statement of a special committee of the World Health Organization (WHO), which concluded that there may be a possibility of developing brain tumors when using mobile phones for a long time. But in almost every sentence, he flattens the WHO results.
In fact, they made no such statement. The special committee announced that the further the device is from one’s head, the lower the radiation. The difference is subtle, and indeed it could have been a misunderstanding by Bilton, but it is very significant, if he is talking about a brain tumor. It sounds like this damage has been proven. The risk is still hypothetical. However, the WHO committee did not do any real research on the length of time a phone could be used that could lead to a tumor, or even how non-ionizing radiation from a phone could alter the DNA of brain cells so that they mutate and become cancerous.
But in Bilton, these words become part of antiscience—that uncertainty equals inadequacy. Scientific uncertainty is the most widely misunderstood aspect of scientific progress. It allows scientists to better describe their assessment and still focus on problems that have yet to be solved. And antiscience is a cause for skepticism, distrust, or worst of all, conspiracy, and allows alarmists to use the good of science to leverage their next bad idea.
