Google the guys name and you come up with this info.
Research conducted by award-winning U.S. scientist Nathan Zohner
Only after the reader has dealt with those questions does he find out (on page 10) that dihydrogen monoxide is H2O. The point of the lesson is that it is wise to be skeptical. This is a very good lesson to teach in the first chapter of any high-school science book
http://www.textbookleague.org/113glob.htm
One of the delights of the 2000 version appears in the new opening chapter, "The Nature of Science." On pages 8 through 10, in a section titled "The Habit of Skepticism," we find a long passage based on the DHMO hoax. That hoax, as some of my readers will recall, involved sensational claims about the fearsome hazards associated with dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO) -- a substance which is widely used as an industrial solvent, and which appears as an ingredient in many food products, even though it can induce physiological derangements, can produce severe burns (especially when it is in its gaseous form), is found in tumors excised from terminal cancer patients, and is known to cause the deaths of thousands of people every year.
A page of horrifying warnings about DHMO was posted on the Internet several years ago, but DHMO didn't gain national notoriety until 1997, when a 9th-grade student in Idaho Falls, Idaho, invoked it in a science-fair project. The student, Nathan Zohner, worked up a scary handout about DHMO -- complete with the news that DHMO "is the major component in acid rain." Then he distributed copies of the handout to fifty other students, and he asked the students to return their copies to him with written proposals for dealing with DHMO. Forty-three of the fifty wrote that DHMO should be banned because of its lethality. Six students declined to make suggestions because they thought Zohner's handout was strongly biased against DHMO and was unreliable. Only one student recognized that DHMO was water.
[Editor's note: The account of Zohner's project that appears in Global Science is serviceable but is marred by omissions and inaccuracies. The account given in this review reflects information that we got from Zohner during e-mail correspondence and a telephone interview.]
A story about Zohner's project was distributed to news media throughout the United States by a wire service, and Zohner's results were widely cited as evidence that the public can be gulled and manipulated easily by purveyors of inflammatory, pseudoscientific propaganda.
The writers of Global Science make some good pedagogic use of this affair. First they tell a little about Zohner and his interest in DHMO. Then they present (on page 9) a modified version of Zohner's handout, and they pose two questions to the reader:
1. Think about the scientific information provided in Nathan Zohner's fact sheet. Do you think
that action should be taken to ban the release of DHMO into the environment? Why?
2. Should the banning of DHMO be done at the local, state, federal, or international level? How
should such a ban be enforced?
Only after the reader has dealt with those questions does he find out (on page 10) that dihydrogen monoxide is H2O. The point of the lesson is that it is wise to be skeptical. This is a very good lesson to teach in the first chapter of any high-school science book.
