← Science In Action
Science In Action
How science got here, and where next
00:31:30
As anti-science leaves research reeling, does evidence-based policy have a future?
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- [00:00]
Roland Pease
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:06]
Podcast Narrator (Ad Segment)
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- [01:08]
Roland Pease
Science in Action first aired here on the BBC World Service in November 1964, a time of great optimism. The space race was fully geared up. Crick and Watson had recently earned a Nobel Prize for their DNA revolution in biology. Nuclear power was promising electricity too cheap to meter. The first electronic microchips were around the corner. The first lasers had been built. The quark model of particle physics. Physics had just been laid out. In the following decades, the program has reported on the Human Genome Project. The rise of gene therapies, the discovery of the Higgs boson, the cramming of billions of components onto chips, space missions reaching the edge of the solar system, the rise of quantum computing. The story on nuclear power, I will admit, is more equivocal. But we've been covering the dark side here too. Global warming, big, barely understood then, is now a crisis unfolding daily. With widespread pollution, deforestation, extinctions. The natural world is threatened. All around us, and particularly since the pandemic, which we also covered in depth, science has been a bit on the defensive, to the extent that America's highly regarded health institutions are now run by anti vaxxers and virus skeptics. And environmental centres are in retreat. Hello, I'm Ronan Pease and this is the last episode of Science in Action. In a much more uncertain age, how did we get here? And how can we restore confidence in science? I'm taking it as a given that all of you, or at least most of you, tuned in, want to do that. I'M joined by climate scientist Michael Mann, whose hockey stick graph of 1998 both epitomised the rapid rise of global warming and made him an early target of anti science. And he's also co author of Of Science Under Siege, published just last month. Also, historian Naomi Aresky joins me. Her merchants of doubt analyzed the way that activists weaponized just asking questions to defend tobacco and oil interests. Her more recent why Trust Science Speaks for Itself. Virologist Aji Rasmussen has come to prominence since the pandemic, particularly for her work confirming the probability that SARS CoV2 came from a wet market in Wuhan. But more broadly, she's been on the front line where where infectious diseases and anti science have clashed. Last of all, Deb Hoorie recently resigned from a leadership role at the US Centers for Disease Control, a prominent casualty of the change of the political leadership there, which we have been following on the program. So thanks first of all to all of you for joining me. If you don't mind, I'd like to start with you, Mike, because you've been fighting this fight, it feels the longest of all. So since 1998, I'm just curious, at what point was your paper about the rate of global warming picked out, as it were, as something to attack and what are your observations? What's happening in the past 25 years?
- [04:12]
Michael Mann
Yeah, thanks Roland. And let me say I think we're all going to miss you. We've had so many great conversations over the years and this is such an important program at a time like this when science is indeed under siege. And so yes, I did see this firsthand two and a half decades ago when my co authors and I published the Hockey Stick Curve and it laid bare the reality and threat of human caused warming that graph. And so it came under attack by the bad actors that Naomi has written so much about that I've written about as well. Fossil fuel interests, petro states, plutocrats who have tried to undermine public faith and science. And let me just say that it was sort of a PTSD for me about five years ago when the pandemic played out and I saw that my colleagues in the world of public health were being subject to precisely the same sorts of attacks using the same tactics, many of the same players, interestingly, who were involved in the anti science assaults on COVID 19 messaging of the public health community, anti vax messaging and you know, the assault on wearing masks and social distancing and all the measures that were necessary. And so I befriended Peter Hotez, a leading vaccinologist who was subject, along with Tony Fauci and others, to these attacks. And we realized that we had a book to write because indeed, even though these are two very same issues and they've played out at very different times, there really is a commonality. And that commonality is that they're powerful vested interests who find the science inconvenient and have used the tremendous power and wealth and influence that they now have to undermine public faith in the science itself with disastrous and deadly implications.
- [05:56]
Roland Pease
It's very interesting you talk about vested interests because in a sense, I don't quite understand what the vested interests are when it comes to public health.
- [06:04]
Michael Mann
Yeah.
- [06:05]
Roland Pease
You know, I understand oil companies might want to keep drilling oil, but who's profiting from attacking public health? That's a bit which I don't understand. I mean, if I can turn to. I want to keep. Keep this rolling.
- [06:18]
Angie Rasmussen
To answer your question, Roland, like, what's in it for the people who are spreading all of this disinformation about public health? It's really the same thing that. That's in it for the people who deny climate change. It's money and it's power. Essentially, people who are saying, don't take vaccines, they're bad for you always have some kind of alternative to offer in place of those vaccines. Don't get the measles vaccine, take cod liver oil. Don't take the COVID vaccine, take ivermectin. Use our services to understand how you can really get around, you know, the bad actors in government who are trying to control your lives through these public health measures that are actually designed to protect people and to preserve public health for the sake of doing that. Because that is, in fact, the government's role. And that's what people like Deb, for example, were doing prior to this entire mess that's afflicted the U.S. i have.
- [07:15]
Roland Pease
To say I'm still puzzled because if, let's say ivermectin, which was being widely promoted, doesn't work, there has to be a public that's receptive to these ideas.
- [07:28]
Angie Rasmussen
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's really hard to compete with the information machine effectively that we're up against. This is very organized propaganda. And actually was reading Naomi's book that really helped give me a lot of ins into what some of these tactics are. The anti vaccine movement, which I'm much more familiar with than say the climate change denial movement. They all use the same tactics, though. They essentially bombard people effectively with lies that are designed to trigger their emotions to also sound very reasonable. What's wrong with asking questions? Why don't we consider alternative hypotheses? All of those things sound very reasonable, but the fact is that they're being presented in order to send a mess that's simply not true. And that message is, you know, whether it is climate change isn't happening. Let's keep using oil, vaccines don't work, buy our alternative treatments, let's make America healthy again. Even though it's going to actually kill millions of people with the changes that they're making. You know, it is designed to be presented in such a way that reasonable people from the public who may not understand the full background and don't have complete information will believe it. And they will also believe that, you know, the government, the people who were working on things like the cdc, where they're trying to keep Americans healthy and safe, are actually not motivated by the fact that, you know, they're serving the American people. They've got all these ulterior motives, when in reality it's the opposite. Every accusation is actually a confession, in my experience.
- [09:07]
Roland Pease
Mike, a quick one.
- [09:08]
Michael Mann
I can see you're ready to talk all of that. And I wanted to add one other ingredient which is important. And Peter and I talk about this in the book. Early on, during the pandemic, because of the lockdowns and the stay at home orders, we were seeing a dramatic decrease in fossil fuel usage. Okay. And that was problematic for powerful fossil fuel interests, including the Koch brothers. And the Koch brothers, the largest privately held fossil fuel interest in the world, actually funded early on the assault on public health messaging, the Great Barrington Declaration, which was an anti science document. Jay Bhattacharya and others were involved with this. That was trying to undermine public faith in the public health community. That was funded by an organization that is funded by the Koch brothers. It was funded by the Koch brothers.
- [10:05]
Roland Pease
You see, that sounds conspiratorial to me, almost like it's true.
- [10:09]
Michael Mann
They actually did it.
- [10:10]
Roland Pease
Well, let's, let's ask them.
- [10:13]
Michael Mann
There's been some really good investigative reporting. And so early on that was a critical factor. And what they did, they weaponized their base against public health messaging, which meant that their base, the sort of MAGA conservatives, were skeptical about everything the public health community had to say. And that would ultimately lead to the prevalence of anti vax sentiment among conservatives.
- [10:40]
Roland Pease
In the U.S. naomi, would you agree with that?
- [10:44]
Naomi Oreskes
Broadly, yes. I mean, broadly, I agree with everything that Mike and Angie have just said. But I guess what I would want to do is to step back a little and to look at the larger political landscape. And that's what my recent work has been all about. And if I can make a shameless plug for my most recent book, the Big Myth. So part of what's really important to understand here is it's not just about the snake oil salesman, and it's not even just about selling a particular product like Ivermectin or even fossil fuels. There's a bigger argument going on here which really explains why the same people who attacked climate scientists are now attacking public health officials. The key word there is public. This is really all about the role of government and the role of government in restraining people who do things that hurt us and protecting us from harmful things, whether they're naturally harmful, like viruses, or whether they're unnaturally harmful like fossil fuels. What we've been facing in this country for more than 40 years is an organized attempt to undermine people's trust in government, because it's the government that regulates things like the fossil fuel industry, it's the government that supports public health and, and protects us from viruses and disease. And so people who don't want the government regulating fossil fuels, regulating the workplace, protecting us from pesticides like glyphosate, which I've written about recently, these people have taken the really broad view, stepped back from the particulars of these issues. I mean, they're involved in the particulars as well, but they also have been financing and funding campaigns. And yes, it may sound like a conspiracy, but it's not a conspiracy in the sense of being behind closed doors, because often it's shockingly out in the open, but a large scale, longer campaign to undermine public trust in government. And so the attacks on vaccine, the attacks on cdc, attacks on the National Institutes of Health, which at first seem mystifying because, as you said, Roland, why would anyone want people to get sick? Why would anyone want fellow human being to die? But if you don't want the government regulating your business, whatever that business is, then that helps to explain the answer to this question.
- [13:03]
Michael Mann
Naomi and I are in complete agreement here, and this is part of our thesis as well. It's sowing distrust in government and sowing distrust in expertise. And that is an extremely important commonality here.
- [13:14]
Roland Pease
And I want to come to that. Deb, you were in public health at the CDC Centres for Disease Control, and you were there, I think, all the way through the pandemic. Did you feel like you were under assault, the way that Naomi puts it?
- [13:28]
Deb Hoorie
Yeah. And it's actually Interesting. Even taking a step before that, before the pandemic, I was running the injury center at CDC and had some politically polarizing topics like the opioid prescribing guideline as well as firearms. And what I found was really by focusing on, you know, patients and protecting health in general, we had bipartisan support. Although I think, like Naomi and the others have said, particularly with the guideline, we saw that the greatest dissent came from those that had conflicts of interest when we looked at, you know, who was providing the most contrast or issues around the guideline. This past year, though, has been something else. At cdc, I was the transition lead for the agency. So I had read several of RFK Jr. S books, had prepared the agency to really focus on the administration's new priorities. But what I saw quickly was data isn't data. You know, I reviewed his books and saw some of his references were to retracted studies. And it's really difficult then to talk about a study at CDC versus a retracted study that he is promoting over and over as what he says is gold standard science, which certainly wouldn't fit, I think, any of our definitions. And we saw that translate to the vaccine committee where we would have, you know, randomized controlled trials presented as evidence, and then they'd bring up personal anecdotes, and that would call into question the higher levels of evidence and really equate or dismiss what we would consider the gold standard science. So it was very difficult to talk about data and science protecting people when you have these personal anecdotes not based on science and potentially based on conflicts of interest.
- [15:04]
Roland Pease
I watched some of these vaccine committees that were held, and as you say, maybe the point is that there's been a failure to communicate the way that science works.
- [15:15]
Deb Hoorie
So I always think we can always communicate better. But I think there's really been pretty clear evidence, you know, on vaccines working, things like thimerosal not having association with autism. I think we would all agree as a group here too, that Tylenol is not associated with autism. But now you see things like that being promoted based on anecdotes or single studies. And so it's very, I think, difficult when you have leaders or those with large social media fallen talking about these studies and really attacking scientists who then fall back on gold standard science and trying to save lives. I think my concern is we are going to see more vaccine preventable deaths in this country. We already did, for the first time in many years, see deaths from measles. We had a polio case a couple years ago we're going to see more and more of that as this misinformation persists, which is unbelievable that we are at this point today.
- [16:11]
Michael Mann
Science denial is literally deadly. That's the message here.
- [16:14]
Roland Pease
Yes, Anshi. I mean, I'm curious that dealing with evidence and you've been on a series of papers, and again, this sort of feels like it should be a sideline in the world of politics. The evidence that the SARS CoV2 virus really did start in that wet market in Wuhan and not in a lab, which is, again, one of these political talking points that has been going on so much. I'm wondering if, well, people like myself, but science journalists more generally, have been effective enough at saying, look, this is how science works. Here is the evidence and for the public to hear it.
- [16:55]
Angie Rasmussen
Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of the places where it gets really, really challenging. I don't think it's been a failure to communicate how science works. I think that we've done as best as we can with that. You know, I think there's. There's issues with the education system that people fundamentally don't understand the scientific method and all of that. But I get really fed up with this idea that it's somehow our failure to communicate that caused all of this. No, it's people lying about the way that the scientific method works. It's people lying about the evidence base. And that happens to be true with the origins of COVID situation as much as it is true also with vaccines. So the origins of COVID What's the more compelling story? We did a geospatial analysis that looked at early cases and showed statistically that the pandemic most likely began in the human population in this wet market, which falls geospatially right in the middle of it. And then on top of that, we have documentary evidence, and now we have genetic evidence as well, that wild animals were being sold there. The only thing we don't have is proof of an infected animal that is consistent with the idea that the virus emerged into the human population via zoonotic transmission. It doesn't mean that people were involved, because obviously the live animal trade is definitely human involvement, but it wasn't gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But how compelling is that story compared to it was a lab leak and Fauci did it. You know, I mean, that. That is a political narrative that also gets people engaged, it gets them involved, and it's a lie. And the problem, I think that we've had with communication is not a failure or lack of effort on our part. It's not a departure from using evidence to, to decide things the way that we've all been trained to do. It's the fact that people are telling more compelling lies than we can tell the truth. And I think that is something that we're really going to have to reckon with because these efforts to lie are extremely well funded. And I think that Mike probably has some insights on this.
- [19:03]
Michael Mann
Deb.
- [19:03]
Roland Pease
Deb, first I was just going to.
- [19:04]
Deb Hoorie
Say I agree with Anthony. She's talking about evidence. And one of the things we tried to do when I was at CDC was show the evidence that there weren't conflicts of interest for the vaccine Committee. We looked at 20 years of the experts and posted them all. And Senator Cassidy even put that into evidence at the hearing. But there were very few conflicts of interest yet. What do you hear from the secretary? You know, that they were all bought by pharmaceutical companies, had extreme bias and conflicts of interest. We saw that they had very little. And many of his experts have actually been expert witnesses against pharmaceutical companies, which I would say that is a significant conflict of interest. But I think it's as the panel saying, it's the stories that are being told about these people versus focusing on what the evidence actually says.
- [19:48]
Roland Pease
Mike?
- [19:48]
Michael Mann
Yeah, so you know, Peter and I use alliteration to describe all of the forces that we're dealing with. Plutocrats, petrostates, propagandists, and I'm sorry to say, the press. And we're not just talking about the right wing press. We're not just talking about Rupert Murdoch, Fox News. We're talking about the performative neutrality of the legacy media. And one of the examples that we talk about relates specifically to this conversation here where the Washington Post and the New York Times over and over have platformed the lab leak theory, which has no scientific support, as if it is on an equal footing with zoonotic spillover. And so you ask, why is the public so confused? Well, they're confused because even the Gray lady, the legacy media, the Washington Post and the New York Times are platforming anti science out of a sense of performative neutrality to show how quote, unquote balanced they are.
- [20:47]
Roland Pease
A reminder you're listening to Science in Action from the BBC World Service.
- [20:54]
Podcast Narrator (Ad Segment)
This is the story of the one. As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running is a top priority. That's why he chooses Grainger. Because when a drive belt gets damaged, Grainger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs and next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork. Call 1-800-granger. Click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
- [21:24]
Caller or Interviewee (Cybercrime Segment)
We got a call from the bank and said, are you aware that there's no funds in this account?
- [21:30]
A string of victims across the US Stretching from coast to coast.
- [21:34]
Michael Mann
The amount of victims in such a.
- [21:35]
Roland Pease
Short time was unbelievable.
- [21:37]
Caller or Interviewee (Cybercrime Segment)
Real people losing real money. But the criminals are ghosts.
- [21:40]
The anger, the frustration, the fear.
- [21:42]
This is Evil Corps, the story of.
- [21:44]
Roland Pease
A cybercrime case that stretches from small town America to the back streets of Moscow.
- [21:49]
Caller or Interviewee (Cybercrime Segment)
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [21:57]
Roland Pease
Actually, it's very interesting you say that, Mike, because we did reports extensively, month after month about the origins of COVID And in a funny way it's. I find it incredibly compelling because of the science, how clue after clue came forward, as Angie was saying, the genetics and so on, but the progress was very incremental, which made it, I think, not a huge revelation that the more general media would report on. Whereas we just heard something from the CIA or we just heard something from some spook is much more compelling. Naomi, I don't know if that's your domain.
- [22:38]
Naomi Oreskes
Yeah, I want to really second what Deb and Angie have just been saying about the lying and being outspent and outgunned. And I think we don't do enough to talk about that because even though increasingly scientists are understanding what we're up against, and Mike and I and many other people have now written books about it, when it comes to these issues, we still tend to retreat to the science and the evidence and the data. And I understand that because I was trained as a scientist too. We don't really want to talk about the lying. It's really unpleasant. Talking about our latest study is interesting and good, but the problem is that the American people and people around the world don't understand how outspent we are. So I think we have to talk a lot more about, you know, Bob Bruhl at Drexel did a great study where he showed that for every dollar spent by an environmental group pushing climate policy based on legitimate Science, at least $10 was being spent by the fossil fuel industry and its allies to deny the science and stop action. So I think we have to do a lot more to talk about that. But getting back to Covid, and this is a really tricky space because on the one hand, I totally agree this is not primarily a failure to communicate. But at the same time, I do agree with what Deb said a few minutes ago when she said, we can always communicate better. And I think in the early days of COVID there were some pretty big problems that we do need to come to grips with and be honest about. And frankly, in the early days of COVID it was reasonable to talk about the lab leak hypothesis because it was a reasonable hypothesis, because lab leaks do occur. But now we're in this place where Angie and other people have done the work that we needed to do, and now we really can say with great confidence it almost certainly wasn't a lab leak. But I think one thing scientists could do better is in the early stages of an investigation when we really don't know. What I would have liked to have heard many people say in the beginning of the pandemic would have been for them to say, we don't know. We're working as hard as we can to figure this out, and as soon as we have good evidence, we. You will be the first to know. And I think if the scientific community had done more of that and less of, no, it can't be a lab leak, I think we might be in a slightly better place today.
- [24:53]
Michael Mann
Quick point. The New York Times and the Washington Post have been platforming the lab leak theory lately. So what Naomi says is absolutely true. And I do think the community might have been able to anticipate how that was going to be weaponized and address it up front. But today, you know, the legacy media should not be platforming anti science as they are.
- [25:16]
Roland Pease
I mean, I don't know if Anshi would agree with entirely with what Naomi just said. And for example, some of the people promoting the lab leak idea had already been saying things similar things about polio and about HIV and so on in the past. So it's not like they had come at this with a fresh mind, necessarily.
- [25:36]
Podcast Narrator (Ad Segment)
Right.
- [25:36]
Naomi Oreskes
But it's tricky because, you know, the old saying about even a broken clock is right twice a day. And I actually wrote about if someone is making a claim and that person is someone we don't like, or that person is someone who has given bad advice or done bad things in the past, the tendency is to want to reject it because, you know, and we all do this, right? If we don't like the messenger, then we reject the message. But I think it's really, really important as a scientific community for us to say, yeah, you know, I don't. I mean, this is going on right now with rfk. I don't like rfk, but it's really, really important for us as professionals and as experts to say, yeah, we really disagree with RFK about most things. We think he's completely wrong about vaccines, but he may not be completely wrong about pesticides.
- [26:22]
Michael Mann
Yesterday he was telling us that we need to eat more saturated fats. And so.
- [26:26]
Angie Rasmussen
No, I know, I know.
- [26:27]
Naomi Oreskes
I'm not defending so much more.
- [26:29]
Michael Mann
The anti science and the nonsense drown out the few pearls of potential truth there.
- [26:38]
Roland Pease
I just want to. As we wind this up, one thing I'm very conscious of is that Science in Action is a global program. We talk to scientists in India, in Australia, China, anywhere in the world. Here I've got four people from the States and I want just to address this question of is this a specifically American problem, or is there some way that this is portending what may happen elsewhere in the world? Deb, I don't know if you've got a view of that from your place in the center of it all.
- [27:11]
Deb Hoorie
Yeah, I mean, I think anything that we see in the US Certainly has ripple effects elsewhere and what's happening globally, we've seen a lot of the theories and misinformation that happened in other countries and then come to the US as well. So I think it's a very porous situation.
- [27:28]
Roland Pease
Naomi?
- [27:29]
Naomi Oreskes
Yeah, I was going to say my team recently did a big study on trust in science in 68 countries. And the good news is that we do that. Overall levels of trust in science are pretty high in most places. So it's important that we don't go into a panic and falsely diagnose what we're facing. But what we also know from history is that these disinformation campaigns, these attacks on science that generally begin in the United States, spread outward. And we're already seeing that with climate change denial. The active effort of. There's a group called the Atlas Network, a network of think tanks that spreads antigovernment, pro free market ideology around the globe. And often it ends up being anti science. And just the other day, the Heritage foundation, who's been much behind many of the attacks on science in the United States, announced its plan to set up offices in the uk so that's a story that I hope you'll watch, even if it's not from this show, in whatever capacity you are in in the future.
- [28:29]
Roland Pease
Mike?
- [28:29]
Michael Mann
Yeah, I agree with everything Naomi just said. And I also want to emphasize the importance of bad state actors, Russian disinformation in particular. There is a campaign underway to weaponize social media globally to destabilize Western civilization. That is their agenda. In a world of conflict and confusion and division, Russia sees themselves as benefiting. And obviously they're a petro state that wants to continue to sell their fossil fuels and they have opposed climate action at every juncture. And so we have to be aware of the fact that what is happening in the United States is also happening. These same actors, we're seeing it in Canada, we're seeing it in the uk, we're seeing it in Australia. It is spreading. They have a much broader agenda than just undermining the United States and science. They're trying to create a new world order in which they prosperity.
- [29:30]
Angie Rasmussen
And she, as an American who lives in Canada, I have a unique perspective on this. And what I'm seeing now in Canada is that we're having the same things happen here that happened in the US for the same reasons. So the trucker convoy that occupied Ottawa for a month in January or February of 2022, those same people who were people who were convicted in the convoy are now currently involved in this medical freedom movement to protest the calling of a flock of H5N1 infected Ostric. They've been out there for six months. And the entire purpose of this is to undermine the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's authority to regulate and manage avian flu outbreaks in the name of, quote, medical freedom. So this is opposition to vaccine mandates. This is opposition to regulation of agriculture and public health. This is opposition to government functions that historically have not been controversial and that are designed for the well being of the people. So these exact same things happened in the US and that's how we ended up where we are now. Talking to my colleagues in other countries. I mean, I've had multiple colleagues from European countries tell me that we're one election away from having what happened to the US happen here. So I think this is very much a global problem. It's not going anywhere. And I'm very, very sad, Roland, that your wonderful international science show is not going to be on anymore to help guide us through this.
- [31:00]
Roland Pease
Well, I don't want this to be about the program, Angie. I actually have a different question for you, which it comes back to almost to where we began, which is as someone who was at, as it were, the interface of pure virology, pure science and public health. It's just again, this idea that it seems interesting that science should be apparently very important in these sort of arguments that are so political.
- [31:28]
Angie Rasmussen
Yeah, I mean I, you know, I'm new to this relatively because prior to the pandemic, you know, I was worried about getting grants and doing my emerging virus research, and I didn't even really talk to people in adjacent fields. I never would have been sitting in panels like this with people with diverse but convergent expertise. I really do believe that this needs to be something that is incorporated into our politics and our policymaking. I mean, we need to do things based on evidence, with multiple types of expertise to interpret that evidence. And I think as soon as we get expertise out of science, this is something that historically has been a huge problem. For example, and under Joseph Stalin, with Lysenko, they get rid of expertise to advance political objectives at the expense of the people and the expense of what's true. And I think that, you know, that makes it even more important for us to speak up and come together like this to make sure that evidence and the scientific method still has a place in these discussions is essential to democracy.
- [32:34]
Michael Mann
Amen.
- [32:36]
Roland Pease
Thank you all very much. Michael Mann, Deb Hoori, Angie Rasmussen and Mamie Reskis. Under other circumstances this week, we might have been exploring the climate drivers of the destructive forces of Hurricane Melissa, the continued spread of H5N1 bird flu, getting closer to Australia, its last continent, or new insights into the extraordinary earthquake earlier this year in Myanmar. But this is the last edition of Science in Action, and I thought it'd be worth looking at this bigger picture of where science is. Tune in next week and you should hear BBC Inside Science. You may not even notice too big a difference, but thank you to Alex Mansfield and all the other members of the BBC Audio science team who've produced Science in Action over the years. And to the presenters who preceded me, making it a global source of science news. To all the scientists who over the decades have given a little time to share their stories. And thank you most of all to all of you for listening to some of its 3,000 or so episodes, including this final one. And with that, this is Roland Petes signing out.
- [33:46]
Caller or Interviewee (Cybercrime Segment)
We got a call from the bank and said, are you aware that there's no funds in this account?
- [33:51]
A string of victims across the US stretching from coast to coast.
- [33:55]
Michael Mann
The amount of victims in such a.
- [33:56]
Roland Pease
Short time was unbelievable.
- [33:58]
Caller or Interviewee (Cybercrime Segment)
Real people losing real money. But the criminals are ghosts.
- [34:01]
The anger, the frustration, the fear.
- [34:03]
This is evil.
- [34:05]
Roland Pease
The story of a cybercrime case that stretches from small town America to the back streets of Moscow.
- [34:10]
Caller or Interviewee (Cybercrime Segment)
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.