THE 11 Z-LISTERS who stormed into the Big Brother house were not the only celebrities under scrutiny this week. Sense about Science, a charity that promotes the importance of scientific evidence, took Joanna Lumley, Melinda Messenger and others to task for not checking facts before backing theories and campaigns.

They quoted Madonna, for instance, talking about neutralising radiation (which is impossible) and blissfully bonkers pronouncements about the evils of milk-drinking by Lady McCartney.

But there was a whiff of scientific sour grapes. Do scientists seriously believe that most of us would trust Madge as a serious source of information, let alone Mrs Macca from Planet Heather? When we really want to make a decision involving science, we don’t consult Hello! And while some of the celeb-speak derided by Sense about Science was wrong, it was what many of us think.

Juliet Stevenson on MMR, for instance, saying that three diseases being injected into a baby seemed “an awful lot for this tiny thing”. Although babies’ immune systems are more than capable of handling several infections at the same time, Adam Finn, a paediatrics professor at Bristol University, has acknowledged that what Stevenson said superficially sounds like common sense.

Remember that the MMR scare started not with a dodgy feature in Heat but a paper in the Lancet. Scientists are fallible like anyone else. The quest for scientific fame caused the Korean stem cell scientist Wook Suk Hwang to fake his results. Bad science makes news; but good science does not yet consistently manage to get messages across to the public.

This leaves the door open for celebrities with controversial credentials. There’s Gillian McKeith, for example, who claims that green vegetables bring oxygen to your lower intestines. To produce oxygen from the green pigment chlorophyll, plants need light — in short supply in your guts, unless you have a friend with a strategically placed searchlight.

Real science urgently needs to develop celebrities to spread the word accurately and accessibly. But it finds it hard to handle fame in its midst. Those scientists who have achieved celebrity status, such as Robert Winston or Susan Greenfield, get more stick from their peers, not the public.

Nor are scientists immune from the perils of celeb-dom. The Nobel chemist Kary Mullis, who invented the technique behind DNA fingerprinting, used his new glittering status to defend a crackpot theory about the origin of HIV.

What science really needs is to get a decent scientist inside the Big Brother house — that could really make a difference.

Explore Health

• Expert Advice

• Health Features

• Mental Health

• Alternative Medicine

• Child Health

• Health Club