The Ethics of Sarcastic Science
Every year the British Medical Journal publishes an issue of joke science. But years later, those papers are cited as real.


This otter is (probably) not laughing about the British Medical Journal. ( Tambako The Jaguar/Flickr )

Every holiday season, the British Medical Journal puts out a special Christmas issue. It’s full of papers, as usual, but they’re all a little bit different. They’re jokes. Not fake—the data presented in these BMJ articles aren’t made up—but the premises of the papers are all a bit off-kilter. This year, for example, they showed that men die earlier than women because they’re stupid.

The BMJ has been loosening its ties every Christmas now for 30 years. In that time it has amassed a fair amount of odd little bits of science. But a recent paper on the subject of joke papers, by Lawrence Souder and his co-author Maryam Ronagh, questions whether these wacky studies are all in good fun, or whether there’s a darker side here. Ultimately, they argue that once the laughs have worn off, spoof papers can actually do damage to science.

Souder’s paper focuses on one case in particular. In 2001, Leonardo Leibovici published a paper titled “Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients with bloodstream infection: Randomised controlled trial.” The study purported to show “whether remote, retroactive intercessory prayer, said for a group of patients with a bloodstream infection, has an effect on outcomes.” The study was farcical—the prayers they said for these patients were delivered between four and 10 years after their hospitalization. In some cases these prayers were said for them after they had already died. The reasoning for this, Leibovici explained, was that “we cannot assume a priori that time is linear, as we perceive it, or that God is limited by a linear time, as we are.”
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