"Doubt is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health "

[csziggy]

That is the title of a book by David Michaels of the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy and is Professor and Associate Chairman of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services. I have not read this book, just a short interview with David Michaels in Science News -

Corporate campaigns manufacture scientific doubt
From the September 27, 2008 issue of Science News

In Doubt Is Their Product, published in April, epidemiologist David Michaels describes the growing corporate practice of “manufacturing” scientific uncertainty to thwart regulation of products that appear to pose risks. Michaels encountered the practice firsthand with beryllium, a metal used at U.S. nuclear weapons facilities, while he was the Energy Department’s Assistant Secretary for Environment, Safety and Health. Now head of George Washington University’s Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy, or SKAPP, Michaels spoke with senior editor Janet Raloff about this doubt-generation movement.

Where did you get your book’s title?

It comes from a 1969 memo by a Brown & Williamson tobacco executive. He said: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’” linking smoking with lung cancer. That tobacco campaign continues to this day, now focused on the issue of secondhand smoke. Before the 1980s, industry could always say that even if smoking does cause cancer, individuals choose to smoke. But as studies emerged showing that nonsmoking spouses also face an increased risk of lung cancer, the stakes changed. Recognizing this potential new liability, the industry hired more and better scientists and strategized how to disparage the cancer studies in order to avoid regulation.

You can document all this?

Absolutely. In great detail. And not just for tobacco. Interestingly, many scientists who initially pioneered this work for the tobacco industry on secondhand smoke now defend producers of beryllium, chromium, pesticides and a whole range of other chemicals by manufacturing doubt about their risks. I even have internal minutes of meetings with trade associations where scientists describe the strategies and studies they need to do for a suspect product to avoid regulation. My research shows that a campaign to generate scientific uncertainty has grown into a very lucrative product-defense industry.I know I’m making very strong statements, but I support every one of my assertions with powerful documents. We’ve placed all of my book’s 1,100 references at http://www.defendingscience.org, the SKAPP website

More at http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/36360/title/Comment__Corporate_campaigns_manufacture_scientific_doubt_by_David_Michaels

I do not have time right now to read the book or get into the SKAPP website right now but thought DUers might be interested in this. I know there have been discussions, sometimes heated, on the validity of popular science conclusions on various subjects. But I did not realize there was such a well organized industry based on warping science to fit corporate motives. I guess I am naive.

[NC_Nurse]

1. Looks like a great book. Scary stuff. I wonder if he deals with the global

warming deniers too. It's amazing how industry has infected science in our country. I know
big pharma controls most of the studies done on new drugs - not a conflict of interest or anything....:think: