The stereotypical image of a scientist is a white-coated figure manipulating sophisticated apparatus in a laboratory. Much science is done like this, but much is not.
The scientific method usually means you pick an unsolved problem, study existing knowledge about the problem, put forward your hypothesis as to the solution to the problem, make predictions based on your hypothesis and test these predictions by experiment.
Depending on your field of study, you may do your experiments in a laboratory, you may do them by tramping through the countryside with binoculars and a notepad or you may do them by analysing health records.
Many biologists suffer from "physics envy". This is characterised by the feeling that you are only doing "real science" when you are studying something at the molecular level. And, of course, you can only study things at this level by using expensive and sophisticated equipment.
This feeling also afflicts the agencies that fund scientific research. The further removed a biologist is from molecular studies, the more difficult, on average, he or she will find it to secure significant research funding.
I am not arguing against molecular research. I also freely acknowledge the current revolution in biological science is heavily peaked at the molecular level. However, there are other important areas in science and it is vital we acknowledge and support these areas.
I will illustrate my point with a medical example. The traditional medical approach to a disease is to study it intensively to find its basic physiological cause and then to intervene (e.g. by designing a new drug) to negate this cause. This doesn't mean other approaches are unimportant or ineffective.
One such approach is observational epidemiology, which searches for causes of disease by studying data at the population level and using statistical analysis to correlate cause and effect.
The epidemiological approach has recently identified the cause of much sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), commonly called "cot death". This work has not received the acknowledgement it deserves and the story is outlined by T. Dwyer and A.L. Ponsonby in the medical journal Epidemiology, vol. 7 no. 3 (1996).
SIDS was defined in 1969 as the appropriate diagnosis when no other sufficient identifiable cause is found in an infant who dies suddenly. SIDS rates increased during the 1970s and 1980s, but its cause remained a mystery. Several hypotheses were proposed to explain the phenomenon, including the notion that placing a baby in the prone position (on its abdomen) increases the risk of cot death.
Right from the start, the majority of epidemiological studies found cases of SIDS were more commonly associated with babies in the prone than in the supine (on the back) position. It was also observed in 1985 that Hong Kong Chinese infants, who traditionally sleep in the supine position, rarely die of SIDS. Campaigns were launched in South Australia and the Netherlands in 1987-1988 to reduce the use of the prone position and this was followed by a decline in SIDS in 1988.
Subsequently, large epidemiological studies in Australia, New Zealand and England confirmed a strong correlation between sleeping prone and SIDS. In 1991, the UK, New Zealand, Australia and several other countries launched national campaigns asking parents not to place their babies prone. These campaigns also made other recommendations such as avoidance of smoking, not overheating the baby, and in Australia and New Zealand, encouraging breast-feeding.
Parents responded by dramatically changing infant sleeping positions. Prevalence of the prone sleeping position declined from 27 per cent to seven per cent in England. SIDS rates plummeted, halving in England and Wales, and almost as much in Australia and New Zealand. The question remained as to whether this dramatic effect is due to sleeping position alone or whether other factors, such as smoking patterns, are equally involved. Careful analysis has shown that 70 per cent of the drop in SIDS rates is accounted for by the reduction in the prone sleeping position.
One would think this evidence is strong enough to confirm the prone sleeping position is a major cause of SIDS. However, two US studies found a much weaker correlation between prone sleeping conditions and SIDS than the international studies cited above. There is good reason to think methodological problems with the US studies account for their weaker correlations.
According to Dwyer and Ponsonby, the reluctance of the medical establishment to accept the prone sleeping position accounts for at least half the incidence of SIDS stems mainly from a concern that the final causal mechanism has not been discovered, i.e. knowledge of what causes SIDS at the cellular/molecular level.
It would be good to know the molecular cause of SIDS and efforts should proceed to elucidate this. But we should not make a false God out of molecular explanations. What matters in medicine is the alleviation of human suffering. We now know how to prevent most cases of SIDS and we know this largely due to the work of epidemiologists. This should be gratefully acknowledged.
William Reville is a Senior Lecturer in Biochemistry and Director of Microscopy at UCC.