The Real Microplastics Problem Isn’t in Your Brain
Takeaways by Bloomberg AI
- A study reported that people carry around the equivalent of a plastic spoon’s worth of microplastics in their brain, but chemists were skeptical of the findings.
- The study’s technique was argued to be unable to accurately distinguish fat particles from microplastics, and the analysis didn’t include necessary validation steps.
- The incident raises an ethical question about whether scientists, science journals, and journalists should be less rigorous or critical of extraordinary results if they raise awareness of serious problems.
In the realm of horror, it was hard to beat the headlines last February that you were carrying around the equivalent of a plastic spoon’s worth of microplastics in your brain. The findings, reported in Nature Medicine, generated lots of outrage on morning talk showsand were even repeated as fact by would-be surgeon general Casey Means.
A number of chemists were initially skeptical of the study, which was based on analyzing brains from a small sample of cadavers. In a rebuttal published last month in Nature, a group of chemists argued that the technique used couldn’t accurately distinguish fat particles that are a normal part of the brain from microplastics, and that the study didn’t include the necessary validation steps to ensure they weren’t simply seeing post-mortem contamination or otherwise misleading themselves.
