MEDICAL ADVANCE, AND SOBER QUESTIONS ABOUT "SETTLED SCIENCE" – AT 9:05 A.M. ET:  We don't do many medical stories here, but I'm quoting this for good reason.  From The New York Times:

He emerged from the car accident alive but alone, there and not there: a young man whose eyes opened yet whose brain seemed shut down. For five years he lay mute and immobile beneath a diagnosis — “vegetative state” — that all but ruled out the possibility of thought, much less recovery.

But in recent months at a clinic in Liège, Belgium, the patient, now 29, showed traces of brain activity in response to commands from doctors. Now, according to a new report, he has begun to communicate: in response to simple questions, like “Do you have any brothers?,” he showed distinct traces of activity on a brain imaging machine that represented either “yes” or “no.”

And a few days ago, The Lancet, Britain's leading medical journal, withdrew a landmark study that seemed to link autism to certain vaccines given to children.

So, science progresses.  It changes.  Einstein's general theory of relativity overturned hundreds of years of Newtonian physics.  Many of us began life at a time when the advice to heart patients was to rest, and essentially withdraw from active work.  The advice is very different today.   

But you would never know that science changes from the true-believer discussions of "global warming."  You'd think it was somehow sinful to question anything with the label "science" attached.  It's settled, isn't it?  It's cast in stone, right?

No.  There is no such thing as "settled" science.  The very word is anathema to true scientists.  As scandal after scandal emerges from the murky world of global-warming "research," we're reminded that real progress begins with questioning.

So now we have an advance in brain-function research.  And we have a major study on autism withdrawn because it didn't stand up in the face of new examinations and probing.

Question, question, question!  Don't let science become political science. 

February 4, 2010