It's because the earth revolves around the sun.
Natural selection; it's how like species become new species.
Well, then it's okay to clone and genetically modify like crops and other animals,
so why can't we do people?
Scientists really should be taking a better
look at the [long beep]
What was, what was that? Did I like, did I say something I wasn't supposed to talk about?
Well guess what, there's more where that came from.
A lot more, and we haven't even mentioned the poop yet.
You might wanna get used to that uncomfortable feeling
because today we are talking about the taboos of science.
Now, hopefully you know that societies have a lot of hang ups like
how people look and how they act and who they knock boots with and
it's mostly pretty stupid stuff.
But taboos are no joke they are powerful things and when it comes to science
taboos can keep all kinds of things from being studied
or even talked about.
Take for example the story of Hungarian physician
IGNAZ SEMMELWEIS.
In 1840, Semmelweis had the audacity to suggest that
doctors in maternity clinics should wash their hands
before examining pregnant women and babies.
An act he correctly predicted would drastically reduce
childbed fever mortality rates.
So how did his colleagues react to this advice?
Uh, not well.
His hypothesis that doctor's hands were somehow "carrying" diseases around
and causing it in babies was ridiculed.
The germ theory didn't exist at the time
and doctors were offended at the idea of having to wash their hands,
possibly also offended at the idea that they had previously
been killing their patients.
So, Semmelweis was fired from his hospital in Austria
and faced so much harassment from the medical community
that he was forced to move back to Budapest.
After decades of anger and bitterness,
Semmelweis was committed to an asylum
where he died in 1865.
Of course, it would only be a few years before Louis Pasteur would come around
and confirms Semmelweis's findings with his germ theory of disease
and Semmelweis is now remembered as a pioneer in antiseptic procedures.
The story of Dr. Semmelweis helps illustrate the power of a taboo.
When social norms forbid a certain practice or way of thinking
and the risk that come along with challenging a taboo.
In fact, there is a name our tendency to reject
a piece of evidence or new theory when it contradicts
social norms.
And it's called the Semmelweis Reflex.
So yeah, science taboos have existed pretty much forever,
going back to Darwin and Galileo, and even the ancient Greeks.
But what about today?
Here we run into a bit of a Catch-22, by definition,
scientists aren't willing to talk about taboos.
Sometimes just because they don't want to talk about it,
sometimes out of fear of losing their jobs or their tenure or their credibility.
Once you start looking, it's clear that almost every
scientific discipline from biology to medicine, to astronomy to physics,
has their own subjects they like to keep hush-hush.
One person, really the only person, who speaks
at length about scientific taboos these days
is this guy named DEAN RADIN at the
Institute of Noetic Sciences, which was
founded to study consciousness and healing.
Emissions that basically make the institute
a taboo in itself.
But no matter how crazy some of his scientific ideas are,
his thoughts on taboos are actually pretty interesting.
He breaks them down into three categories:
transitory taboos, stubborn taboos, and
super double secret super taboos.
Transitory taboos being controversial topics that
gradually become less controversial over time.
Science has a lot of transitory taboos;
practises that not only accepted today -- they're practically mandatory.
Like vaccinations, organ donations, blood transfusions.
At one time or another, all these things were considered
either medically impossible or dangerous quackery.
Today, they remain scientific procedures that are controversial but are still done, like
embryonic stem cell research or maybe even a better example,
embryos that contain both human and animal cells -- chimeras.
Now the idea of fusing together different species
is not cool with a lot of people, but
it's done in labs around the world. Transplanting
human stem cells into prenatal non-human animals
allow scientist to study human cell development without
directly using human embryos.
So, chimeras have been created fusing human cells
with rabbits, and pigs have been created with human blood cells.
Yes, there are mice running around in labs right now
that contain human brain cells.
Now it starts on where the conversation often turns to
cloning, which is where you enter into some serious
stubborn taboo territory.
Since Dolly the Sheep became the first mammal
to be cloned in 1996, scientist have cloned: mice, dogs, cows, pigs.
The FDA has deemed that milk and meat from cloned animals is safe to eat and drink.
You'd think it was practically mainstream.
You start talking about cloning humans, you're not just
talking about breaking taboos, you're probably also breaking laws.
Research into human cloning is illegal in many countries including all of
the European Union, Australia, and Canada.
And thirteen states.
But not here in Montana. Ah yeah!
So why the taboo?
Well, there are lots of ethical and religious arguments,
but it's the biological arguments that really make the topic off limits, because cloning
is hard and it's dangerous.
Attempts at animal cloning produce many
dead, deformed, and diseased animals.
Not to mention lots of embryos
and fetuses that are loss.
Cloning pioneer, Dr. JAMES ROBL, has said that in
addition to those dangers and the low survival of
offspring, you'd need a huge number of donor eggs and
women willing to be surrogate mothers.
Which makes human cloning a really big problem.
And as far as we know, a human clone has yet
to be born, though not for lack of trying.
In 2009, a Greek biologist, whose name I cannot pronounce, claimed to have cloned
fourteen human embryos and transferred eleven of them into four women.
He was either lying or the transfer failed,
either way, it did not go over well with the biology community.
But really, human cloning is just so last season as taboos go.
If you're looking for a taboo for today's scientist,
allow me to introduce you to synthetic biology,
otherwise known as "extreme genetic engineering."
This is an emerging technology in which genetic strains
of organisms can be changed or created from scratch
to allow the organisms to perform
different functions, like new algae-engineered produced biofuels
or bacteria altered to fight disease.
Of March of 2012, a host of different advocacies
organizations called for a moratorium
on the release and commercial use of these synthetic organisms
and their product, until regulations can be established.
The groups also called for a ban on manipulating the human genome...
or the genomes of the microbes that live in
or on the human body;
don't leave them out.
So far we mainly talked about biology and
genetics taboos but what about taboos in other disciplines?
Well in the field of mental health there is sex
especially anything other than heterosexual sex.
For instance gender identity has become less of a taboo topic in recent years.
But many psychiatric organizations still classify gender dysphoria as a mental illness.
So should for instance a child who doesn't identify with
their physical sex be given drugs to delay the onset of puberty?
Giving them more chance to decide if they want a sex change?
And then there is the question whether sexual orientation is partially decided by your genetic code or
perhaps more taboo questions
should we even be looking for these things.
Well, at least one study of gay brothers, by geneticist Dean Hammer,
claimed to find a link between DNA markers
on the X-chromosome and male sexual orientation.
In physics you could argue that it's taboo to contradict Einstein.
Look what happened when certain physicists
appeared to have clocked neutrinos moving faster than
the speed of light, which is of course impossible
under Einstein's theory of special relativity.
When the news got out that the scientists had made
a mistake, which they pretty much already knew.
The media went nuts with headlines, like:
"Einstein vindicated!" and
"Einstein owns Cern physicist from the grave".
As for archaeology it's practically off-limits
as an entire discipline in some cultures.
In Israel, for instance, some ultra-orthodox groups
regularly protest archaeological digs because they
consider it sacrilegious to disturb human remains.
Now, finally, there are these supposedly double secret
super taboos, according to Dean Radin.
Here he includes things like spirituality and
consciousness or what he calls "psychic phenomenon".
Now, as far as I'm concerned these topics don't have
much to do with science, so I see them more as irrelevant rather than taboo.
But maybe the most dangerous secret taboo in science
today is what Radin and others have identified as the "Poo Taboo".
Now, this is an important public health topic
that not enough people want to talk about and address
because it has to do with poop
and that makes people uncomfortable.
There are over 7 billion people on Earth
and only about 1.5 billion of those people
use flush toilets that are connected to sewage systems
and that's just not right.
Human waste is a major breeding ground for pathogens
and parasites that end up contaminating ground and
surface water supplies if it's not disposed of properly.
And when it's not you end up with a global sanitation crisis.
Unfortunately what has been dubbed the
"Psychology of Excrement" often prevents solutions
from being discussed on local, national, or global levels.
It's proved to be such a frustrating taboo that some
scientific and humanitarian groups have challenged it head on
namely with world toilet day, which celebrated it's 10th
anniversary last November. It's basically a day to
heighten awareness about a topic that people
don't like to discuss and raise money for sanitation
champions like nonprofits that help with public health needs around the world.
So I say we take a page from the toilet day playbook
and pull some important scientific taboos out
of the closet.
We're all adults here, right?
But what do you think?
I will say that as we were doing this episode
we had to not include a bunch of stuff because
it was way too taboo to talk about in a YouTube video.
Which is crazy because it's a YouTube video, right?
But I'm curious what taboos you think we should have talked about.
You can leave those down in the comments down below
or on Facebook or Twitter, also questions or ideas
for other episodes of Sci show.
We'll see you later.