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By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

When we don’t know how to reprogram our remote control for our garage, search engines like Google can not only offer a written explanation, but can also provide videos with step by step guides that make even the least mechanical people — okay, me —barely competent.

Yes, I can change most light bulbs. Let me rephrase that: I can change most conventional light bulbs. For whatever reason, the fluorescent ones that require turning them at exactly the right angle befuddle me.

Google can also help us find ways to improve our daughter’s softball swing, can explain the Pythagorean Theorem, and can give us quizzes to help us prepare for important exams in school.

When we don’t know the history of an important event, when we want to find some information about someone before we go to a job interview, or when we are curious about what other movies someone who looks vaguely familiar in a streaming show has also been in, we can type their names and find instant answers.

And yet, shockingly, Google and other search engines have their limitations.

Search engines connect the words we’re looking for to the information, or misinformation, available online. These engines don’t have a fact filter, a scientifically proven filter, or an incontrovertible truth filter. It’s up to us to decide whether what we see or read is valid.

In fact, I would advocate for a high school class on information vs. misinformation, giving students a chance to think for themselves to spot online fakes. Most teenagers and 20-somethings, for example, can spot an altered photograph based on the unusual shape of an arm, different shading patterns, or, perhaps, a turn in a shoulder that defies our normal biological range of motion.

When people are in panic mode about a rash, the sudden onset of vague symptoms — a high fever, fatigue and muscle aches, perhaps — they sometimes race to plug those symptoms in to a search engine in the hopes of self diagnosing.

While that might save them the trouble of going to an emergency room in the middle of the night, where they could have to wait hours to see a medical professional, the use of a search engine can also create unnecessary anxiety and frustration or provide a false sense of security.

A search engine diagnosis that indicates you or your loved one might have some horrific disease likely raises your blood pressure and may cause you to drive erratically to a hospital.

A friend of ours once received a horrific call that his daughter was injured at school. During a long and excruciatingly painful drive through the night, he set his cruise control to the speed limit, despite his urge to drive 100 miles per hour. He recognized that he wouldn’t do himself, his family or his daughter any good by getting into a car accident or endangering the lives of others on the road during that painful trip. Fortunately, his daughter made a complete recovery.

Such rational thinking on the part of someone in intense distress, however, may not apply when people make a search engine diagnosis.

Recently, I spoke with Dr. Sharon Nachman, Chief of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Disease at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital, about several different viruses. I suggested to her that the symptoms for different conditions seemed remarkably similar, with the kinds of general physical discomfort, fever, and aches dominating the list, making it difficult to come up with an accurate diagnosis. 

“That’s why Dr. Google is not the right answer,” Dr. Nachman said.

For illnesses or symptoms that rise to the level of genuine concern, people should consult physicians who can test for a range of potential problems, ruling out conditions until they come up with an informed diagnosis.

In some cases, time is of the essence, with drugs like Paxlovid providing effective relief for Covid-19 within a limited time window, or Ttaamiflu offering the most effective benefit for people with the flu within 48 hours of the beginning of symptoms.

And, while Google may help with your science homework, the search engine may prove especially useful in directing you to experts at hospitals or urgent care centers who can interpret your symptoms and offer an informed diagnosis.

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By Elof Axel Carlson

Elof Axel Carlson

Some of my friends and relatives since I was a high school student have told me that I know a lot. In one sense I do because I have an excellent retentive memory and can recall isolated facts that struck me as interesting at the time. 

In my high school history class, my teacher Mr. Emil, was groping for the name of a German reverend who opposed Hitler and was imprisoned for his preaching. I raised my hand and said, “Was it Pastor Niemöller?” I was looked upon as a freak by my classmates because I recalled this from listening to a radio program with my father and brother called This is the Enemy. 

I identified this talent as having “a flypaper memory.” If it’s significant to me, it sticks in my head. Of course, I also read a lot and since my father bought a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica when I was born in 1931, I browsed through it on rainy days and amassed enormous trivial knowledge from Japanese bonsai gardens to a graveyard (necropolis) of embalmed cats mummified by ancient Egyptians who worshipped a cat goddess, Bubastis (or Bastet).  

What I have learned over all these years of reading widely is that it would take centuries to read all there is to know of the known world and that as much as I have learned over the 88 years of my life so far, only gives me a small amount of the knowledge that exists.  

Furthermore, we don’t know how much of the universe works, whether it is life or the earliest stages of the birth of the universe. We don’t even know how many laws of science are yet to be discovered. 

But look at it this way. We live at best some 90 years today. Of recorded history (3000 years), that’s about 3 percent of the time humans have accumulated knowledge and written about it. No single person can read all the books in the Library of Congress, or the British Museum or the Vatican Library. This means when we try to solve concerns in our own lives and times, we are limited in the resources we can reasonably read relevant to what we want to do or solve. 

In a democracy we are diverse and have competing needs and priorities. We do as best we can with what we already know or with the help of others who know more than we know because their interests are slightly different from ours. It is this pooling of knowledge that allows us to do better than trying to “reinvent the wheel” each time we come across something new in our lives or our country’s experience. 

Complicating our ability to solve problems is the way we accept or reject evidence or information. We filter knowledge through mental prisms that include our religious beliefs, our ideological beliefs (liberalism versus capitalism, democracy versus authoritarianism, patriotism vs  criticism of government policy), or our professional habits (debate and amassing one sided briefs for those in legal professions including politics) and the apparently inconsistent findings science provides through experimentation and evidence (radiation is good for diagnosis and treatment but it also can cause harm to healthy cells or mutate genes in our gonads and pass them on to future generations.  

We like to have simpler ways of seeing things and doing things. But reality is often more complex, more intertwined with other things that make a simple approach difficult and often strewn with unintended consequences.  People who dump waste in rivers and lakes I believe are sincere when they feel that nature heals itself. But being sincere is not the same as being right and we have numerous episodes of smog, polluted rivers that kill off fish and other life in them and make our drinking water contaminated with toxic chemicals. People are sincere also when they feel God looks after us or that the virtuous are spared in natural disasters .

Would 500 people huddle in a church during a tornado or would they rather be in several hundred separate underground shelters? The more complex the issues are in society, the more likely is it that there are no simple responses to them, and we need to listen to many and go with the best that we have available from our collective knowledge.  Unfortunately, informed debate is not always what we experience at the political level where decisions are made.  

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

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I’m not a scientist and I don’t play one on TV. Nonetheless, I think science is undervalued in America. I believe the typical American takes science for granted, thinks science owes them something and figures they’ll never understand what scientists are saying.

Wrong, wrong and wrong.

For starters, science isn’t just about trying to create the best iPhone, the highest quality and thinnest televisions, or medicines that act like magic bullets, destroying evil in our cells or our DNA without damaging the healthy ones.

Science often starts with a question. Why or how does something work? And, perhaps, if we change something about the way it works, does it get better or worse? The conclusions scientists draw when they solve one puzzle leads to the next set of questions.

It’s as if a child asks his parent if he can go west and the parent says, “No, don’t go west, but here are the keys to the car.”

The answer may seem like a non sequitur, but it’s also a way to navigate somewhere new, even if, for whatever reason, the car isn’t supposed to go west. Maybe, by learning more about the car and where it can go, the child also learns what’s so forbidding about going west, too.

We want science to succeed and we’re annoyed when science doesn’t solve our problems. We can’t get something to work or we can’t get ourselves to work and we blame scientists. After all, if we can send a man to the moon, why can’t we conquer the morning rush hour or the common cold?

Then again, how does the study of dark matter — neutrinos or sphingolipids — affect our morning commute? We may not understand these areas, but that doesn’t mean basic knowledge can’t or won’t lead to advances we can’t anticipate.

Knowledge, as we know, is power. If we know, for example, that an enemy is planning an attack and we know where and how that attack will occur, we can defend ourselves, even if that enemy exists at a subcellular level.

Learning the playbook of the enemy takes time, which technological innovation, dedicated researchers and people battling against a disease often don’t have.

Worst of all, though, science is somehow too hard to understand. That is a defeatist conclusion. Yes, scientists use technical terms as shorthand and, yes, they may not be selling ideas or themselves in the kind of carefully crafted tones often reserved for CEOs or politicians.

That, however, doesn’t mean they are planting a keep-out sign in front of them or their ideas. While scientists reduce a question to an attainable goal, they also often keep a larger goal in mind.

A few years ago, my daughter had to draw a picture of what she thought a scientist looked like. Rather than imagine a person in a white lab coat with one pocket full of pens and the other holding a radiation badge, she drew a baby.

Science may be frustrating because scientists often come across as uncertain. For example, they might say, “We believe that the shadow in our telescope may be caused by an exoplanet orbiting a star that’s outside the solar system, and which is the same distance from its nearest star as Earth is from the sun.”

Scientists can be wrong, just as anyone can be wrong in their job, in their opinions or in their conclusions. That, however, doesn’t make science wrong. Scientists are often most excited when a discovery they make defies their expectations or bucks conventional wisdom.

Just because conventional scientific wisdom changes doesn’t mean every part of it is wrong.

Science doesn’t have all the answers and it never will. The most likely person to tell you that, though, should be a scientist, not a journalist.

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