Celebrities and science

It's been said that one of the unfortunate realities of our age is that the general public becomes concerned about an important issue only after a celebrity brings it to their attention, and the more beautiful and scantily-clad the celebrity, the more attention she gets.

The pitch of certain celebrity cries seemed particularly intense when George Bush Jr. was in the White House.

These surveys by a science-education group in the UK suggest a more malign influence by celebrities on the public's understanding of health.

http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/search/results/818017183274975d937...

An investigative journalist program in Canada once went undercover and filmed a Christian fundamentalist group masquerading as a "pregnancy education" centre. The centre's employees repeatedly lied to women about the risks of abortion. It almost got shut down for practicing medicine without a license.

Does anyone think the way some celebrities go about their claims is comparable to what the fundamentalists are doing? Resistance to vaccinations is getting to be a real problem, and I can't help but wonder if celebrities are an influence. If true, that's much more significant than what they say about a politician or a war.

I think you have a broken link in your post. Is the page that pops up generated by LT? - it looks suspicious.

The link isn't cooperating. Either that or LT has an "offensive content" block which responded to the description of Alex Reid's approach to weight loss.

I suggest going to "senseaboutscience.org" and using "celebrity" in its search engine in the top right-hand corner.

It was working for me yesterday. My guess is that the last part of the URL refers to a particular search result that the site caches for a while but eventually discards.