Akin Has Company: 5 Politicians Who Got the Science Wrong

A microphone and large crowd. — Think, then speak.

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Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo) is in hot water with the public — and his own political party — for claiming that pregnancy from "legitimate rape" is rare because "the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

Akin's extremely non-scientific beliefs (which he has since recanted) put him in the company of a number of politicians who have made scientific claims that don't quite stand up to scrutiny. Here's a sample:

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Plants do require carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. But what's the saying about too much of a good thing? In fact, too much CO2 can actually decrease photosynthesis in some plants, according to a 1985 study published in the journal Photosynthesis Research. Overdosing on CO2 can also prevent some grasses, including wheat, from taking up nitrate, a crucial nutrient for plant growth, according to research published in the journal Science in 2010.

Bachmann's comments reflect anti-vaccine notions found on both the political right and left, but they don't appear to reflect reality. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) keep a national database of adverse vaccine reactions. For Gardasil, the most common problems are fainting (from the jab), pain and redness at the site of the injection, and dizziness, nausea and headache. There have not been reports of mental retardation caused by the vaccine.

Not quite. It seems the research O'Donnell was referring to was a 2005 study in which fetal mice were injected with human embryonic stem cells. The mice were born with human brain cells in their skulls, but certainly not human brains — and there was no "cross-breeding" involved. The mouse brains were more than 99 percent mouse cells, and the interloping neurons did not change the rodents' behavior. The ultimate goal of the study was to develop stem-cell treatments for neurological diseases, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

It's not entirely clear what health benefits Coburn was referring to, though SourceWatch, a website run by the Center for Media and Democracy, suggests that perhaps he meant to reference a 2005 study published in the journal Breast Cancer Research that found that women who got breast implants after mastectomy from early-stage cancer had less risk for later breast cancer mortality than women who did not get them. The women with implants were younger and less likely to have disease that had spread than the women who did not get the implants, however. [Cleavage Countdown: 8 Facts About Breasts]

While Obama avoided touting a link between vaccines and autism, his statement on "inconclusive" research doesn't pass muster. There is no evidence that vaccines cause autism, despite multiple studies that attempted to find such a link. In fact, the study that first touted this link was retracted in 2010 by the journal The Lancet, after an independent council concluded that the study was fatally flawed. For example, the 12 children in the study were cherry-picked by the researchers rather than being an arbitrary sample of patients as the paper had claimed.

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Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior. She was previously a senior writer for Live Science but is now a freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, and regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly magazine of the American Psychological Association. Stephanie received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.