This is a guest post by Dr. Jeffrey H. Toney, an educator and scientist whose career has spanned academia and the pharmaceutical industry, and currently serves as the dean of the College of Natural, Applied and Health Sciences at Kean University. He blogs regularly at ScienceBlogs, NJ Voices, OpEdNews and The Huffington Post.

Sex sells…but can science? Grabbing a consumer’s attention using sex goes beyond branding. In fact:

…sex is an inherent, inseparable brand message. It is the message.

Scientific messages are becoming increasingly apparent in advertisements, whether as claims of health benefits (“clinically proven”) or trumpeting a “scientific breakthrough” displayed, inexplicably, by showing chemical structures or dramatic hi-tech animations. This is a curious schizophrenia. On the one hand, the public is often disinterested and skeptical of scientific claims, often confusing facts with opinions. Evolution and climate change are obvious examples.

Coverage of science in the news media has declined dramatically:

“For every five hours of cable news, less than a minute is devoted to science; 46 percent of Americans reject evolution and think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old; the number of newspapers with weekly science sections has shrunken by two-thirds over the past several decades.”

On the other hand, use of science within advertising somehow bestows upon the product a higher status, a gravitas, the excitement that this thing that the consumer must have is one of a kind, a rare breakthrough discovery. More perplexing is the way that science is presented in these ads – as something mysterious (chemical structures fly across the screen), as something utterly confusing to the non-scientist.

Consider the L’Oreal Paris Youth Code Collection. An article in The New York Times heralded that “L’Oreal Paris Cracks the Code”–presumably referring to genetic code. The commercial:

“Specially formulated with Biolysat, Adenosine and enhanced with peptides, the Youth Code GenActiv TECHNOLOGY™ targets the repair gene and enhances its ability to regenerate under stress.”

What is Biolysat? What is adenosine? A “repair gene”? {Most people know what a gene is, but what is it repairing?} What does it mean to “target” a gene? Doesn’t that sound dangerous?

It gets worse:

“Biolysat works to activate the expression of the repair gene while Adenosine, a molecule that is naturally found in skin cells’ DNA and acts as an anti-wrinkle ingredient, helps stimulate DNA and protein synthesis.”

What is “activate the expression of the repair gene”? “Stimulate DNA and protein synthesis? An astute non-scientist could interpret this as something harmful. After all, don’t cancer cells grow rapidly, making more DNA and more protein?

My focus here is not to debunk the scientific claims behind these statements. That would be relatively easy, requiring no more than a few hours exploring the scientific and medical literature coming from the Saint-Louis Hospital Skin Research Institute in Paris, the home base of these products. Instead, I wonder what led the marketers to decide to use such representation of science in their advertising. Certainly they did market research that supports the approach.

So how could the same public be attracted and engaged by science in advertising but remain skeptical and generally apathetic towards science? Exploring this requires a deep understanding of sociology, psychology and even neurology – just to get started. Like any worthwhile scientific research project, this opens up many more questions for exploration. I can’t wait.