Serious claims belong in a serious scientific paper

By BEN GOLDACRE - GUARDIAN.CO.UK
Added: Sun, 23 Oct 2011 15:13:55 UTC

RDFRS previously posted an article about Greenfield here.

If you have a serious new claim to make, it should go through scientific publication and peer review before you present it to the media
If you think video games harm their players, publish a paper to say so

his week Baroness Susan Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford reportedly announced that computer games could cause dementia in children. This would be very concerning scientific information. But this comes from the opening of a new wing of an expensive boarding school, not an academic conference. Then a spokesperson told a gaming site that's not what she means. Though they didn't say what she does mean.

Two months ago the same professor linked internet use with rising autism diagnoses (not for the first time), then pulled back when autism charities and an Oxford professor of psychology raised concerns. Similar claims go back a long way. They seem changeable, but serious.

It's with some trepidation that anyone writes about Professor Greenfield's claims. When I raised concerns, she said I was like the epidemiologists who denied that smoking caused cancer. Other critics find themselves derided as sexist. When Professor Dorothy Bishop raised concerns, Professor Greenfield responded: "It's not really for Dorothy to comment on how I run my career."

But I have one, humble question: why, in over five years of appearing in the media raising these grave worries, has Professor Greenfield of Oxford University never simply published the claims in an academic paper?