[tt] NS: Review: Doubt is Their Product by David Michaels and Bending Science by Thomas O. McGarity and Wendy E. Wagner

[Premise Checker]

I await a review of those who professionally doubt human variation.

Review: Doubt is Their Product by David Michaels and Bending Science by 
Thomas O. McGarity and Wendy E. Wagner
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826605.900&print=true
Thomas O. McGarity and Wendy E. Wagner
11 June 2008
Merrill Goozner

REAL science depends on the dispassionate search for truth, said
sociologist Robert K. Merton a half-century ago. To claim the mantle
of scientist, a researcher must be divorced from preconceived bias
or monetary gain, and the work should be subjected to the rigorous
scrutiny of a community of peers. At the height of the cold war,
Merton's coda provided a ringing defence of Enlightenment values.

But by the time Merton articulated those ideals, the tobacco
industry had already set in motion a pseudoscientific strategy that
threatened to undermine them. Big Tobacco's advance guard created a
non-profit institute, hired scientists and commissioned papers with
a single purpose in mind: to cast doubt on what would soon become a
flood of evidence proving that smoking kills.

It worked. Public campaigns to combat smoking were delayed for
decades; regulation was forestalled. In a 1966 memo, a tobacco
industry official let the cat out of the bag: "Doubt is our product,
since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that
exists in the minds of the general public," he wrote. "It is also
the means of establishing a controversy."

Today, the doubt-and-delay strategy is used by almost every industry
facing health and environmental challenges - including oil companies
working to generate public scepticism about the role of carbon-based
fuels in global climate change. As David Michaels persuasively
argues in Doubt Is Their Product, the tobacco industry's
anti-anti-smoking campaign has become the template that every
company can turn to when its bottom line is threatened by health,
safety and environmental laws.

He should know. Michaels, an occupational safety expert at The
George Washington University in Washington DC and a former US
government regulator, was caught up in the action as several of
these kinds of campaigns played out. Benzene, asbestos, vinyl
chloride, chromium 6, ortho-toluidine... the pattern was always the
same.

Companies, often operating through non-profit research institutes
set up by themselves or by a trade association, hired scientists
skilled in the arts of toxicology, epidemiology and risk assessment
to poke holes in any research suggesting that exposure to these
chemicals could cause disease or death. Even US government agencies
and their contractors got in on the act, as the defence and energy
departments' campaigns to downplay the risks of perchlorate,
nuclear-weapons-plant radiation and beryllium attest.

Doubt is Their Product exposes the names of industry-funded players
and the tricks of their trade. Some reanalyse data to downplay the
health or environmental risks of their clients' products. Others
testify as expert defence witnesses when those products are on
trial.

But not all industry-funded studies or hired researchers can easily
be dismissed. To his credit, Michaels admits that his field,
epidemiology, is "a sitting duck for uncertainty campaigns".
Exposures must be estimated; human vulnerability must be
extrapolated from animal studies; minute exposures to toxic
chemicals may cause diseases such as lung cancer, but these diseases
could also be triggered by half a dozen confounding exposures.
Practitioners of the uncertainty craft often don't have to try very
hard to cast doubt on the assumptions behind the estimates of their
more public health-oriented colleagues.

Thomas McGarity and Wendy Wagner cover much of the same ground in
Bending Science, but where Michaels uses detailed anecdotes, the
University of Texas law professors rely on examples drawn from the
popular press and legal scholarship.

They begin with a sober observation: studies informing regulatory
decisions are hardly the cutting edge of science. How many
scientists want to spend their careers chasing government grants to
determine the fate of airborne toxins spewed from coal-fired
electricity plants? The job becomes even less appealing when laws
like the Information Quality Act, created by a tobacco industry
consultant and passed without debate, can be used to cast doubt on
their work and undermine their conclusions.

Where Michaels organises his book around particular incidents,
McGarity and Wagner take a thematic approach: how corporations hide
data; how they use the courts to undermine independent scientists;
how they successfully publicise their own studies. They even take a
few well-deserved shots at public-health advocates who employ the
same tactics, such as the environmental group who, in 1989,
overhyped the carcinogenic risk of Alar, a common pesticide.

Unfortunately, Bending Science too often relies on legalese to make
a point, and I found myself scurrying to the footnotes to find basic
information. Even then, my questions often went unanswered.

What can be done about this industry of manufactured doubt? McGarity
and Wagner believe that greater disclosure of who funds science,
public access to all data in industry-funded studies (as is now the
case for government-funded studies), and the elimination of
scientists with conflicts of interest from advisory committees will
allow regulators to "weed out bent science". That's true, but only
if agencies have the time and resources to do so.

Michaels calls for an accountability law to do for science what the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act tries to achieve for business in the US, complete
with penalties for scientists or corporate executives who manipulate
data or restrict freedom to publish. His idea is based on a similar
premise: sunshine is the best disinfectant.

I'm not so sure. After years advocating for such solutions (full
disclosure: the http://www.cspinet.org/Center for Science in the
Public Interest where I work exposes failures by scientists to
disclose conflicts of interest in the press and scientific
literature, and lobbies against allowing scientists with such
conflicts to serve on federal advisory committees), I believe the
time has come to try an approach that Michaels mentions only in
passing: true independence.

In 1971, Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson proposed that all
scientific studies needed for regulatory purposes be conducted by
investigators completely free of ties to companies with a stake in
the outcome of that research. His proposal went nowhere at the time,
but we're beginning to see renewed interest in the idea -
particularly in healthcare, where independent studies comparing
rival medical technologies is one way to rein in skyrocketing costs.

This approach would require a much greater role for
government-funded science, which anyone familiar with the internal
politics of a National Institutes of Health grant review knows can
have its biases. But institutional conflicts of interest are of less
consequence and easier to manage than science driven by the
corporate bottom line, which, as these two books copiously
illustrate, inevitably undermines the Mertonian ideal.

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Weblinks

Merrill Goozner's blog, GoozNews
http://www.gooznews.com/
The Integrity in Science project, Center for Science in the Public 
Interest
http://www.cspinet.org/integrity/