Canadian Lawyer - sample

22 M A R C H 2 0 1 9 w w w . c a n a d i a n l a w y e r m a g . c o m F or those trained in the sciences and the practice of law, where skep- ticism, logical reasoning and critical thinking are the most closely held tools to guide them through life, it's vexing to witness seemingly intelligent people duped by pseudo-scientific nutrition advice and treatments for illnesses with no evidence of effectiveness. Timothy Caulfield, a University of Alberta law professor, Canada research chairman in health law and policy, research director of the Health Law Institute and Netflix star, has made a career confronting fads and false hype and strength- ening public representations of science and health-policy issues. He's written the best-selling books The Cure for Everything! Untangling the Twisted Messages About Law professor Timothy Caulfield's Netflix show and best-selling books target health fads and those who promote them By Aidan Macnab DEBUNKING PSEUDO-SCIENCE C R O S S E X A M I N E D Health, Fitness and Happiness, Is Gwyneth Pal- trow Wrong About Everything? When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash and The Vaccination Picture. He is also the host and co-producer of the Netflix documentary show A User's Guide to Cheating Death. Caulfield's cross-disciplinary journey to fame began when, as a young law student at the U of A, he took a summer job at the school's Health Law Institute. The job was a medley of science and other empirical research, social science, policy-making and traditional legal scholarship, "and it changed my life," he says. Caulfield's work then earned him a grant to study the legal, ethical and policy implications of genetic research and introduced him to his mentor Bartha Knoppers, who is now director of the Centre of Genomics and Policy at McGill University's Faculty of Medicine. "It was so eye-opening for me and it really took me down an unconventional path where I was working with scientists, I was working with clinicians, I was working with philosophers," he says. Knoppers "taught me that the career of a law professor can look like a lot of different things." Caulfield's research progressed to how sci- ence, health and policy issues are represented in the public sphere and he found himself in the world of celebrity culture, with its seeming omnipotence in influencing consumption. Since his first book on health and exercise myths, Caulfield's purpose has been arming citizens and consumers with scientific literacy so they can resist the daily tsunamis of unsubstanti- ated, scientific-jargon-laden claims deployed to detach them from their money. "I increasingly noticed the predominance of pseudo-science and misinformation and health myths that pervade our society. It drove me nuts," he says. Caulfield is also prolific in Canadian media, both as an expert and a columnist. But in the age of Twitter-bots, fake news and social media's algorithmically built ideological echo-chambers, it is increasingly hard to shift public conscious- ness no matter how solid one's argument. In a 2018 issue of the journal Science, a study conducted by Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral showed the ease with which false information rapidly circulates social media. The researchers looked at 126,000 true and false sto- ries transmitted through Twitter from 2006 to 2017, which were tweeted more than 4.5 million times. They found that lies spread significantly further and more quickly than the truth.

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