Science Literacy Lags

Sobering news regarding the state of "scientific literacy" in the United States:

Dr. Miller, 63, a political scientist who directs the Center for Biomedical Communications at the medical school, studies how much Americans know about science and what they think about it. His findings are not encouraging.

While scientific literacy has doubled over the past two decades, only 20 to 25 percent of Americans are "scientifically savvy and alert," he said in an interview. Most of the rest "don't have a clue." At a time when science permeates debates on everything from global warming to stem cell research, he said, people's inability to understand basic scientific concepts undermines their ability to take part in the democratic process (The New York Times).

How true. If you don't know what a cell is, you won't have much to work with as far as the stem cell debate goes.

Now if that isn't sobering enough, how about this? A Tufts University School of Medicine report suggests that most published research findings may be false.