Monday, May 19, 2008
'Sound science' is damaging
Steve Huff
Recent columns
From the RoundTable blog
When it comes to science these days, one man's junk is another man's proof; one man's logic, another man's ruse.
In the early 1990s, as Newt Gingrich choreographed his Republican Revolution, I was oblivious to this scientific paradox. My hands in a cadaver, my eyes in a microscope and my nose in a medical text, I knew only one kind of science.
Then I joined a medical student club to discourage smoking in kids. We took Tupperware containers of human lungs, black from smokers and pink from nonsmokers, to classrooms. We armed ourselves with statistics. In our short white coats, we preached what we had witnessed from molecular to societal levels: smoking will addict you, make you stink, make you sick and kill you.
My father, a politically conservative real estate developer, shrugged his shoulders. Why go to such lengths to prove what has been known for decades? "Even back in the '50s we called them cancer sticks," he said.
We underestimated our opponents.
I'm not talking about Joe Camel or the Marlboro Man. I'm talking about CEOs, lobbyists and politicians. I'm talking about those who told smokers and executives what they were dying to hear. I'm talking about Gingrich's hot new politico-socio-scientific phenomenon called "sound science."
What is "sound science?" It is bogus data from industry funded studies. It is lobbyists using whatever means necessary to kill legislation. It is Big Tobacco executives swearing on a Bible in front of Congress that cigarettes are not harmful. It is raising and lowering the bar of scientific proof according to the desired outcome.
Patients were emboldened. They asserted to me that if cigarettes were harmful, pediatricians would not have blown smoke in their ears to cure infection. They muttered about impositions on their smokers' rights. Their eyes glazed over as I warned of the risks of heart disease, emphysema and cancer.
Call it doubt-mongering, denialism, or my favorite, manufactroversy; by any name it is effective.
It engulfs evolution -- as solid a scientific theory as there is -- in a shroud of doubt. It labels those who would reverse global warming as arrogant Chicken Littles. It deters parents from vaccinating their children. It oversells sexual abstinence and undercuts contraception. It sets us back years in genetic research.
You'll see a few fringe liberal groups -- environmental, animal rights, academic -- fiddling with the numbers to their advantage. These groups, however, pose little threat. They have little money, influence or clout. The Republican Party, on the other hand, has brought the tactic into the mainstream.
Without a standard scientific leg to stand on, Big Business and religious hardliners -- the Republican base -- turn to "sound science." Gingrich pumped up the ball, Tom DeLay picked it up and shuffled it to Karl Rove, who ran it into the end zone. George W. Bush spiked it and did the funky chicken.
It's good that a guy named Victor Crawford wasn't in the stands. For much of his career as a lawyer and tobacco lobbyist, he weakened and killed scores of anti-tobacco laws. A smoker, he was weakened and killed himself by throat cancer. In his last couple years, he set out to redeem himself. He exposed tobacco lobbyists and legislators for who they were.
"You're not going to see any antismoking legislation come out of Congress as long as the Republicans have control," he told the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1995. "You're in the big leagues, and you've got to expect to get beaned and spiked. That's the way it is."
He was right. The tobacco settlement of 1998 came not through Congress, but through the attorneys general of 50 states.
Here's the thing: As clear as it is that smoking is harmful, it is equally true, and will become equally obvious, that evolution theory is solid, that humans have dangerously warmed the Earth (Gingrich and Bush are just now admitting this), that sexual abstinence training does not work, that stem cell research is vital, that pollution restrictions should remain strong, that our health care system has failed, that the Iraq war was unjustified and so on.
Rolling your eyes? Ask yourself where you get your information. If it is Fox News, conservative talk radio or the like, remember this: "Sound science" might make you feel good for a while, but, as it did to Gingrich, DeLay and the latest Fox News darling, Rove, it will eventually take you down. There is no doubt it has done as much to America.
Huff, a family physician from Patrick County, is a Roanoke Times columnist.
