Cutting Boards Revisited
One advantage of writing articles about science is that scientists are, by and large, a civilized lot. Offend them, and they're more likely to try to straighten out your thinking rather than your kneecaps. One does learn, though, to understand what they really mean when they politely point out that perhaps an error has been committed.
Thus, when Dr. Brian Himelbloom sent a civil note suggesting I had overstated the importance of a study concluding that wood cutting boards were less likely to harbor disease organisms than were plastic ones, I knew what he was really saying. It was, "Good grief, you knucklehead! Are you trying to kill people?"
Himelbloom is an assistant professor of seafood microbiology at the Fishery Industry Technology Center in Kodiak (which, thanks to state cost-cutting measures, is administratively under the School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences of the University of Alaska Fairbanks---that is, Himelbloom is a UAF researcher). Thus he knows his germs, and understands the real health dangers of contaminated food. He has both a right and a duty to speak out when someone advocates bacterially hazardous behavior. As well as writing me, he also sent warnings to newspapers that published the offending column.
"The conclusion of the unpublished study," he wrote, "suggested that plastic cutting boards retained more microorganisms than wooden boards. However, several studies including two published during the 1980s show the opposite, that is, the inferiority of wooden surfaces in food preparation."
He has two points worth considering there, both reflecting on the practice of science in general as well as on what board should lie beneath the Sunday roast. As his second point emphasizes, scientific studies can come up with apparently contradictory results. Headlines and news broadcasts seem to make that clear every day; foods once deemed good for you (the vegetable oil in margarine makes it the healthier spread) don't look so good on closer examination (margarine is bad for the cardiovascular system). The moral might be something like, wait a bit before changing behavior because of a scientific finding, especially one reported in the popular press.
This brings up Himelbloom's first point: the work establishing the healthy properties of wood as a surface on which to prepare food has not been published in the scientific literature. To nonscientists, that might seem like a point of snobbery. So what if it hasn't been published in some journal only a few people read? It's in the newspapers---isn't that publication enough?
Well, no. When scientists speak of "the open literature," they don't mean literature as in William Shakespeare or Jack London. To enter the literature, a scientific author doesn't need merely to please a publisher or an editor. He or she must also pass muster with experts in the field. The manuscript reporting on a study' s results will be scrutinized by other scientists who will look with highly critical eyes at techniques and methods, procedures and mathematics, assumptions and conclusions. Their task is to find any flaws in thinking or presentation, and they are keen hunters. These reviewers are considered to be the writing scientists' peers---their professional equals---and peer review is taken seriously indeed. No reputable journal would publish a report that failed its peer review. If the reviewers' missed anything, the readers are very likely to find it. Nothing human is foolproof, of course, and scientific publications have had their embarrassments. But Himelbloom's concern that the public press is not really publication is well taken. The researchers may be right in asserting the natural superiority of wood, but all scientists would see it as a claim not proven until it is published in a peer-reviewed journal.
