Yervant Terzian, chairman of the Department of Astronomy, describes how radio waves from space are collected by an antenna atop the Space Sciences Building during a demonstration for science journalists June 28 on how signals from extraterrestrial intelligent beings might be detected. Adriana Rovers/University Photography
Extraterrestrials and ESP, materials from insects and medicines from plants -- a group of journalists attending a workshop here June 27-29 heard about the research possibilities from Cornell experts in a variety of fields as they learned about the scientific method.
The Third Annual Josephine L. Hopkins Foundation Workshop Hands-on Science for Journalists, a three-day program that brings journalists to campus to hear about different areas of science, offered a smorgasbord of research -- and some magic -- in an effort to educate writers who cover such issues so they, in turn, can educate the public.
About 30 writers and book authors representing such publications as Discover magazine, Popular Science, Audubon, OMNI, Biotechnology World, The Scientist, Syracuse Post-Standard, Ithaca Journal and Albany Times-Union took part in the program, sponsored by the Hopkins Foundation, the Department of Astronomy, the Division of Biological Sciences, the departments of Communication and of Science and Technology Studies, the Division of University Relations and the Cornell News Service. Organizers included Yervant Terzian, the James A. Weeks Professor of Physical Sciences and chairman of astronomy; Peter Bruns, director of biological sciences; and Bruce Lewenstein, associate professor of communication and science and technology studies.
How can journalists, in a society fascinated by and some would say obsessed with pseudoscience, write intelligently about what is real science?
"The scientific method presumes individual scientists can behave dispassionately. They cannot. You can't understand science if you think science is done that way," Henry Bauer, chemistry professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, told the group in a lecture, "The Myth of the Scientific Method." Bauer is author of a book of the same name.
"What is the difference between real science and pseudoscience? It's not the scientific method," Bauer continued. "Parapsychologists are much more careful in their protocols than psychologists, yet it's beyond the pale. I doubt you can show it to be pseudoscience by comparing it to the scientific method."
"Real" science, he said, goes through social filters -- "disciplined interaction among people in the scientific community, in which scientists keep each other honest," he said. It cannot be done by one person; it involves the whole community, he said.
On Friday morning, Terzian and James Cordes, professor of astronomy, discussed life on other planets and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
"I'd be astounded if there weren't life elsewhere," said Cordes, who described ways in which we can search nearby stars for signs of intelligent life.
Terzian presented the problem that, based on the number of stars in the galaxy and galaxies in the universe, statistics show life should evolve elsewhere. "But," he pointed out, "where is everybody?"
"It's entirely possible," Terzian said, "that others have evolved around other stars. But there is no unambiguous evidence of extraterrestrial life. Living beings are a magnificent arrangement of atoms -- the same atoms as everything else in the universe. Today, we think we're it. But if you have similar conditions somewhere in the universe, you will have complexity."
The afternoon was devoted to parapsychology and how to detect a fraud.
"We are going to have to look to quantum mechanics to understand psi effects," Daryl Bem, professor of psychology, told the journalists in an afternoon lecture-demonstration called "Parapsychology vs. Magic."
A part-time professional magician who performs mentalist tricks, Bem, quoted in the July 8 Newsweek about parapsychology, became interested in the scientific study of psi (the unexplained processes of information or energy transfer) when he was asked to find the fakery in other parapsychologists' extrasensory perception studies -- and couldn't.
Now his Cornell laboratory is one of several to claim that extrasensory perception occurs, in scientifically controlled circumstances, at least one-third of the time (pure chance would have a success rate of 25 percent). Experiments under way at Cornell are attempting to determine whether two even farther-out forms of telepathy -- clairvoyance and precognition -- are possible, Bem reported before launching into his magic act.
The professor-magician astonished his audience by seeming to know the contents of a sealed box, to guess the word on a page of two different books and, in an elaborate routine involving a letter postmarked June 20, to have predicted the June 25 bombing of the Saudi Arabia military barracks.
In his show-stopper, Bem seemed to perceive details in the homes of two out-of-town "volunteers" -- from oriental rugs on a blue slate floor and the location of the step-aerobic equipment to the model of home computers and names of their children.
"Nothing you saw here was psychic; I have no psychic abilities. It was all done the way Randi would do it -- better, in my estimation. The real magic is how to get someone to respond to a stranger on the phone," Bem said, revealing that workshop organizers had provided him with participants' numbers and that he had called spouses at home the night before.
Amazing feats of arachnids, the spiders that produce industrial-strength silk, were the Saturday morning topic for Lynn Jelinski, director of the Center for Advanced Technology in Biotechnology. Assisted by students Amy Blye, Neeral Shah and Kai Wu, the engineering professor showed how golden orb-weaver spiders produce dragline silk that is studied here for insight to its molecular structure. Jelinski's ultimate goal is to genetically transfer the spider's talent for making super-strong fibers to crop plants, thus sparing the orb-weavers the trouble of making super fabrics.
Although her laboratory was the first to make a magnetic resonance image of a living spider, Jelinski said the orb-weavers retain at least two secrets: How the spider manages to keep the silk-making material in liquid form until it leaves its body through the spinneret, and why the spider's internal ductwork is five times longer than "necessary" to link the gland that produces liquid silk and the spinneret.
"There must be some chemistry going on there that we need to learn about," Jelinski said.
There is indeed much more to learn about the chemistry of the natural world and its possible uses, Professor of Biology Thomas Eisner agreed in a subsequent presentation, "Chemistry From Insects." While workshop participants sniffed vials of a chemical Eisner had provoked a jumbo-sized Florida cockroach into spraying, the biologist suggested how to narrow the "chemical prospecting" search to a manageable number of potentially useful compounds for further investigation.
The fact that the cockroach sat fearlessly on his finger, Eisner said, "is a biorational clue that it has some chemical trick up its chitinous sleeve." The pungent chemical turned out to be an aldehyde, also found in some plants, that the fearless cockroach employs to defend itself.
"In every system, if you look closely enough, you will find a predator that copes with the defenses," Eisner said, "and that is another clue." He described a beetle that clings so tenaciously to surfaces that it seems to have suction-cup feet. In fact, the beetle has specialized structures on its feet that distribute a special oil for adhesion. That baffles hungry ants but not certain predatory insects that inject toxins to relax the beetles' knee joints and make them lose their grip. And recently, bacteria have been found feeding on the oil from the beetles' feet, Eisner said, suggesting further investigation of pollution clean-up organisms "that water-ski behind the Exxon Valdez." In other words, they're not ready -- yet -- to clean up massive oil spills such as that from the famous incident off Alaska's coast, but perhaps one day they could be used for such a project.
Eloy Rodriguez, the professor of environmental studies who made a science of documenting which plants wild animals eat, gave a lecture-demonstration on "Medicines From Plants," ranging from Africa and the Amazon to backyard Ithaca.
Plant roots, leaves and flowers have very different problems to solve with chemistry, said the scientist who later would give a field-trip discourse on the perils of poison ivy. While some plant parts are toxic -- or at least not as healthful as herbal hucksters tout them to be -- plant flowers are usually harmless and may even be good for you, Rodriguez noted, adding, "If you're ever stuck on a Club Med tour, eat flowers. You won't drop dead."
Of his observations of self-medicating apes and their Homo sapiens counterparts, Rodriguez said, he has concluded: "Animals generally won't lie, but people will lie about plants." Showing a photo of a common rain forest tree, Rodriguez said there are at least 150,000 different natural compounds in a single tree. And that doesn't count the unexplored chemical constituency of all the arthropods and fungi associated with that tree.
"You could build an institute around that tree and employ scientists for a long, long time," said the scientist who takes Cornell undergraduates to an Amazon field station to study plants and the animal life that lives on them. "I don't pretend we are finding a cure for AIDS," Rodriguez said of his expeditions, "but we are getting a better understanding of the chemistry of the Amazon."
Not all the interesting chemistry is in the tropics, the Cornell scientists attempted to prove in an afternoon exploration of the newly designated Preserve for Research in Biodiversity and Chemical Ecology. The world's first such preserve in the temperate zone, the 270-acre melange of diverse habitats is located about eight miles southwest of Ithaca in West Danby.