“Wash all fruits and vegetables with turmeric water due to the spread of Nipah virus through fruits and vegetables. That’s the only remedy available. It is spreading at a very fast pace and has a 70% death rate. Already 10 people have died in the past 2 days.” —a Whatsapp forward that was going around during the Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala last year.

In this day and age of ultra-connectivity and ubiquitous Internet connections, most of us have had exposure to such forwards on social media platforms. The fear of life and our concern for our close-knit group of friends and family leads to these messages achieving virality very quickly. The above message only recommends one to wash fresh food supplies with turmeric (commonly used in Indian cooking, anyway), which sounds pretty harmless.

But there are messages which venture into far more dangerous territory such as the safety of vaccines or life-saving drugs, areas which require the highest degree of scientific discipline and vigour. For instance, messages claiming that certain life-saving drugs can cause cancer, or that diabetes patients can skip insulin injections in favour of drinking bitter gourd juice every day.

Most of these messages follow a common theme. First, it picks on an element of threat—real, perceived or manufactured. Second, it hypes the threat up (fear-mongering). Then, the message offers you a solution (often a home remedy or an inexpensive alternative). Finally, the message often claims these remedies are “scientifically proven” or “being used in the US/EU”. The message often includes the name of a supposed medical practitioner whose endorsement it has.

This tricks the masses into believing: (a) there is an easy remedy out there which is being endorsed by a “doctor”; and (b) if it is being used widely in the US, it should certainly be beneficial. More often than not, a lot of us fall into the trap of believing these are scientific facts and forward these messages without a second thought.

The West is no alien to pseudo-scientific messaging either. For instance, the outbreak of measles—which was almost on the verge of eradication in Europe—has risen significantly as fake news on the safety of vaccinations led to a drop in vaccination numbers. Compounding the problem is several popular political leaders using these viral social messaging forwards as a source of information, acting as nodes of propagation. Therefore, now more than ever before, the common man must be aware of what classifies as science and what does not.

One must understand the rigour that goes into the process of creating a pool of scientific knowledge. In this age of social media, each one of us is equally vulnerable to falling for misinformation masking itself as a scientifically proven fact.

Article 51A of the Constitution talks about the development of scientific temper, but there’s very little popular discourse surrounding scientific temper—or the lack of it. To inculcate scientific temper, and declutter the noise from the facts, we must understand the discipline of curating facts before we move on to the science (and art) of creating new ones. This process is as much a fundamental tenet of science as grammar is to a spoken language.

First off, sources of information can broadly be classified as follows:

Primary sources: Any source of information which is first-hand, such as an interview or a personal account. Primary sources typically do not directly analyse content that has been created by other primary sources.

Secondary sources: Information created out of an analysis of one or many primary sources. It builds on already existing primary information to draw inferences. The most common example of this is, say, a critique on the popular works of Shakespeare by a modern-day author.

Tertiary sources: These sources typically curate information, making use of all primary and secondary sources of information on any particular topic. An encyclopedia would typically be classified as a tertiary source.

Any piece of information that you acquire should be traceable to one of these three kinds of sources (unless it is a figment of one`s imagination). In addition to the roots and the basis being traceable, any information in the public domain regardless of its author or its source must withstand the process of falsifiability (essentially, scrutiny or questioning) before it can be labelled as a scientific fact.

Finally, the most important aspect of the process of creating scientific knowledge is reproducibility. For any finding to be labelled as scientifically robust, any person trained in the discipline (physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, engineering etc) should be able to obtain the same results if they were to follow the methodology followed by the author. In some ways, a robust scientific finding is like an instrumental composition. A composition will sound the same regardless of the artist performing it as long she uses the same instruments and the acoustics of the hall are similar.

Just as the composition outlives the composer, robust science outlives the scientist. The hallmark of science which distinguishes it from other belief systems is that it is always open to them being questioned. Falsifiability of scientific findings is often cited by evangelical individuals as a weakness of science. These individuals go on to claim how a 1,500-old scripture is superior to a scientific finding because a scientific finding has been proven wrong by subsequent other findings. One must not get swayed by such an argument because it is actually a testament to the fact that science keeps reinventing and incorporating new knowledge within itself, which is not something that could be said about other belief systems. 

So how does one distinguish misinformation from real science? To understand that, take an example of how a chemical compound goes from being a lab molecule to being a prescription drug such as an antibiotic. Let’s say a lab works on developing new anti-fungal compounds against fungal infections and wants to test several potential candidate molecules. A target compound which could be a derivative of a naturally occurring molecule or chemically synthesised is purified and the target germ (a fungus, in this case) is subject to different amounts of this compound.

Experiments are conducted to quantify the growth characteristics of the fungus in presence of these candidate molecules. Assume Drug A showed the highest inhibition property of the set of target compounds. The scientists would further test these results under different conditions relevant to human physiology and document the exact protocol and nature of these conditions. If the results hold up to the tenets of reproducibility and falsifiability, such a drug would go through for drug trials on model animals, humans and so on—a process that often takes several years. It is only after all this rigorous scrutiny that a drug gets approved for market use.

This brings us a full circle back to the Whatsapp forward on turmeric versus the Nipah virus. If we put the WhatsApp forward to test, holding it to the same standards that we discussed above, you’ll find that the message says nothing about the source of information or as to how they arrived at the conclusion on its efficacy. We often get swayed by how these forwards brand their findings as being supported by “reputed scientists” in big universities without actually verifying the validity of these claims.

This ability to question and verify is something that is fundamental to a functioning society which bases itself on reasoning and takes decisions based on logical reasoning. The failing of the scientific community and the education system at large is that it segregates people based on their specialisation into separate boxes of those practising arts, science or commerce. Worse, having a career in science doesn’t make you immune against falling for these fake Whatsapp forwards. 

The scientific methodology is one that doesn’t take holy cows and involves the art of questioning. Practising scientific temper is thereby a fundamental duty of every citizen in order to ensure we have a functional democracy and a progressive society that values facts and knowledge over misinformation and chaos.

So before you mass forward a WhatsApp message the next time, ask yourself why you should believe it. The mere existence of a piece of information—often misinformation—does not mean it is robust unless it adheres to these tenets of science.