Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13882

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Goozner M.
Review: Doubt is Their Product by David Michaels and Bending Science by Thomas O. McGarity and Wendy E. Wagner
NewScientist 2008 Jun 11
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19826605.900-review-idoubt-is-their-producti-by-david-michaels-and-ibending-sciencei-by-thomas-o-mcgarity-and-wendy-e-wagner.html

Abstract:

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 …