The science world is often misunderstood by the general community because of the way scientists present their findings to the rest of the world. The way that science papers are often presented are too scientific and complex for the general public to understand which is why scientific research gets downplayed so much. Also science isn’t portrayed in the news very often because it lacks the drama element news reporters look for when reporting. So often people are in the dark when it comes to science which makes them skeptical because people don’t trust what they don’t understand. This lack of knowledge can lead to people not trusting scientific discoveries and vaccines that are beneficial to people.

The news coverage of science isn’t very broad and when they do present articles it is usually for entertainment or drama. David Icke published an article called “Cancer is a Fungus and it is Curable.” In this article David Icke mentions Tullio Simoncini’s discovery that cancer is a fungus and it can actually be cured by ingesting sodium bicarbonate (Icke). If you know about cancer and how it works you would be infuriated by even the title of the paper. What is more infuriating is the amount of people who actually believe what this guy is saying. On June 3, 2013 a GOP lawmaker tried to approve the cost effective method of getting rid of this fungus by putting a pic line in the body and flushing it out with sodium bicarbonate (Benen). The fact that this guy is able to sway people with no evidence to back himself up just shows that people are easily influenced by people who present interesting information whether it is right wrong.

Watson and Crick are known as the ones to discover the molecular structure of DNA in the 1950’s. People little know about Miescher who was the discoverer of the DNA or Levene who investigated the structure of the DNA or Chargaff who came up with the rules of DNA (Pray). This is because of the way that Watson and Crick present their information. They presented it in a way that was not strictly science based but in a way that even people who didn’t know much about science could understand. The tone they used in their article was very confident and relaxed which puts the reader at ease.

The way that scientific papers are written probably deters a lot of people from wanting to read them. If you look at the nature website, which is a website for scientific articles, you can clearly see that the website is meant for people with more than just a rudimentary understanding of science. Just looking at the titles of the articles you can tell that the papers are written for people in the scientific rhetorical community. Complex articles like these are the reason people choose to believe in fake science because people will often trust what is the easiest to understand even if it isn’t reliable. This leads to false beliefs and conspiracies such as the idea that pharmacies are evil and the government wants people to die to keep population down (Icke).

Rhetoric is important in presenting scientific information, the first thing that needs to be taken into account when presenting something is who the audience is. Scientists need to find a way to generalize the information they collect from their experiments so that the general public will be able to understand the information presented. The reason some people don’t believe in science is because it is not represented properly by the scientific community. The controversies that come from this leads to the increase of preventable diseases. Alternative medicine has also been on the rise which is treatments that aren’t proven to work. Alternative medicine usually has to do with religious superstitions or just unproven remedies.

The controversies do have a negative effect on the funding that medical research gets. If the people are skeptical of the medicine then the scientists will receive less money for medical research. “Americas share of global research spending fell 6 percent in five years” (Bidwell).

Bibliography

Icke, David. “Cancer Is A Fungus… and It Is Curable.” Cancer Is A Fungus… and It Is  

Curable. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2015.

Benen, Steve. “GOP Lawmaker Sees Cancer as a ‘fungus'” Msnbc.com. NBC News

Digital, 25 Feb. 2015. Web. 25 Feb. 2015.

Pray, Leslie A. “Discovery of DNA Structure and Function: Watson and Crick.”

Nature.com. Nature Publishing Group, n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2015

Bidwell, Allie. “U.S. Medical Research Spending Drops While Asia Makes Gains.” US

News. U.S.News & World Report, 2 Jan. 2014. Web. 25 Feb. 2015.