The End of Doom

by Ronald Bailey

  For example, one famous study found a link between heavy coffee drinking and pancreatic cancer that disappeared once the smoking and alcohol consumption habits of coffee drinkers were taken into account. In addition, biases can creep in because it turns out that the control population differs in significant but unrecognized ways. For example, a finding that exposure to electromagnetic fields caused leukemia disappeared when differences in the incomes of the case population and the control population were taken into account. There is a well-known epidemiological relationship between poverty and cancer.

  The problem is, epidemiologists generally find far more false positives than they do true positives—that is, they identify far more associations between phenomena than eventually are found to be the case. How do we know that there are far more false positives than true positives? Because the vast majority of epidemiological studies are not replicated. In other words, other, later researchers do not find that the risk factor identified in the initial observational study is in fact associated with a disease. S. Stanley Young of the US National Institute of Statistical Sciences estimates that only 5 to 10 percent of observational studies can be replicated.

  In addition, there is a strong tendency among epidemiologists to publish only studies with positive results. Reporting only positive results (that is, a finding that some risk factor is associated with disease) skews the literature toward implying that various risk factors are more dangerous than is really the case. Others worry that researchers may try to please their sponsors, especially the government regulatory agencies that fund their research. As one anonymous researcher at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences told Science, “Investigators who find an effect get support, and investigators who don’t find an effect don’t get support. When times are rough it becomes extremely difficult for investigators to be objective.”

  Even with the best of scientific intentions, it is not easy to sort actual risk factors from the statistical background noise of confounders and researcher biases. “With epidemiology you can tell a little thing from a big thing. What’s very hard to do is to tell a little thing from nothing at all,” said Michael Thun, an American Cancer Society epidemiologist, in 1995. Former Boston University epidemiologist Samuel Shapiro agrees: “Epidemiologists have only primitive tools, which for small relative risks are too crude to enable us to distinguish between bias, confounding, and causation.”

  So, most epidemiologists will agree that one study that identifies a small effect means very little. However, if a number of studies consistently find a similar small relative risk for a factor, then perhaps the factor is causal. But consistency among studies can go only so far. If all of the studies have the same design, they could all be implementing the same biases and missing the same confounders and thus producing the same spurious positive results. That brings up the issue of pathological science.

  Possibly Pathological Science?

  In 1953, Nobel Prize–winning chemist Irving Langmuir identified what he called “pathological science,” or “the science of things that aren’t so.” In his 1992 summary of Langmuir’s insights, Denis Rousseau noted that “the first characteristic of pathological science is that the effect being studied is often at the limits of detectability or has very low statistical significance. Thus it can be difficult to do experiments that reliably test the effect.” In such scientific situations “unconscious personal bias may affect the results.”

  Experimental researchers into the effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals have devised a set of exquisitely sensitive cell-based and animal model tests to detect their subtle influences. They then turn around and justify the relevance of the barely detectable responses conjured from their hypersensitive assays by citing supposed endocrine disruptor effects found in human epidemiological studies. Amusingly, some epidemiologists return the favor and suggest that the plausibility of their very weak findings is justified by the experiments using the sensitive assays. Neither bothers to explain why the results of these highly sensitive tests have any relevance to human health.

  Rousseau adds, “Because the effect is weak or of such low statistical significance, there may be no consistent relationship between the magnitude of the effect and the causative agent. Increasing the strength of the causative agent may not increase the size of the effect.” Another hallmark of pathological science is that its effects can be elicited by only some researchers, who are then unable to communicate how they achieve them to other researchers. Proponents of endocrine disruption generally respond that outside researchers who can’t replicate their findings are simply not careful enough. Naturally, practitioners of pathological science are impervious to critiques and accusations of sloppiness on their part from other scientists.

  In addition, practitioners of pathological science propose eccentric theories, positing mechanisms that appear nowhere else in related sciences. In this case, champions of the environmental endocrine disruption hypothesis reject the standard thinking in toxicology, according to which the biological effects of a substance increase as the dose increases, often summarized as “the dose makes the poison.” Instead, they propose the concept of nonmonotonic dose response, in which exposures to allegedly endocrine disrupting compounds exhibit a U-shaped dose response curve—that is to say, barely detectable doses produce a big effect that falls off as the dose increases to a certain level, at which point bigger doses also produce big effects.

  Perhaps environmental endocrine disruptor researchers have uncovered a real phenomenon, but most toxicologists doubt it. “Although this hypothesis is consistent with the ideas of homoeopathy, it contradicts centuries of toxicological and pharmacological experience demonstrating that active substances produce a specific dose-response in the affected organism,” tartly asserted one group of critical toxicologists. Homeopathy is a medical pseudoscience in which the alleged remedies are so diluted that they often do not contain a single molecule of any supposed therapeutic substance. Low-dose effects indeed.

  To explain how researchers and whole fields of science can end up studying phenomena that don’t actually exist, Stanford University biostatistician John Ioannidis fancifully describes the highly active areas of scientific investigation on Planet F345 in the Andromeda Galaxy. The Andromedean researchers are hard at work on such null fields of study as “nutribogus epidemiology, pompompomics, social psychojunkology, and all the multifarious disciplines of brown cockroach research—brown cockroaches are considered to provide adequate models that can be readily extended to humanoids.”

  The problem is that the Andromedean scientists don’t know that their data dredging and highly sensitive nonreplicated tests are massively producing false positives. In fact, the Andromedean researchers have every incentive—publication pressure, tenure, and funding—to find effects, the more extravagant the better. But in fact, the manufactured discoveries are just estimating the net bias operating in each of these “null fields.”

  During the past twenty years hundreds of millions of euros and dollars of taxpayer money have been spent on endocrine disruptor research with essentially no results. In a remarkable and thorough 2013 scientific review article, a team of toxicologists bluntly suggests that all this funding has likely produced “a vested interest of scientists in the endocrine disruption field to keep the endocrine disruption hypothesis on the agenda in order to stay in business.” Decades of research and hundreds of millions of dollars in funding have resulted in the publication of more than 4,000 different articles. “Taking into account the large resources spent on this topic, one should expect that, in the meantime, some endocrine disruptors that cause actual human injury or disease should have been identified,” the researchers argue. “However, this is not the case. To date, with the exception of natural or synthetic hormones, not a single, man-made chemical endocrine disruptor has been identified that poses an identifiable, measurable risk to human health.” They damningly add, “Certainly, there has been much media hype about imaginary health risks
from bisphenol A, parabens, or phthalates. However, no actual evidence of adverse human health effects from these substances has ever been established. To the contrary, there is increasing evidence that their health risks are absent or negligible—or imaginary.”

  As Denis Rousseau cogently reminds us, his description of “science gone bad is not a portrait of deliberately fraudulent behavior. Pathological science arises from self-delusion—cases in which scientists believe that they are acting in a methodical, scientific manner but instead have lost their objectivity. The practitioners of pathological science believe that their findings simply cannot be wrong. But any ideas can be wrong and any observation can be misinterpreted.”

  On the basis of the evidence so far, there is a very good chance that the study of endocrine disruption will ultimately turn out to be what Ioannidis calls a null field. In which case, apocalyptic researchers will have provoked the public and policymakers into spending a great deal of time, energy, funding, and regulatory attention on another exaggerated environmental scare.

  5

  The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes?

  THE CRYSTALS AND GEMS GALLERY IN HANALEI, a trendy little town on Kauai, displayed several posters protesting GMOs and offered flyers urging a ban on biotech crops. The gallery is the sort of place where, when my wife picked up an attractive stone and asked a clerk what it was, the reply came back, “Do you mean, what does it do?” Apparently, that particular rock can dispel negativity.

  After being advised on the therapeutic properties of various crystals, we asked the clerk what all the anti-biotech literature around the shop was about. Among other things, she informed us that biotech crops cause cancer, stating emphatically that Kauai’s cancer rates were exceptionally high, especially among people who live close to the seed company fields on the island where biotech crop varieties are grown.

  As it happens, the state Health Department reported earlier in 2013 that “overall cancer incidence rates (all cancers combined) were significantly lower on Kauai compared to the entire state of Hawaii.” Nor did the department find higher rates of cancer in those districts where the seed company farms are located.

  Some readers will recognize that the title of this chapter is taken from the 1977 comedy horror movie of the same name in which giant mutant tomatoes nearly destroy humanity. Unfortunately, it is not just winsome clerks in crystal shops who fear that modern biotech crops are the moral equivalent of homicidal tomatoes. Major environmental lobbying groups claim to be troubled by them too. For example, Doug Gurian-Sherman, a scientist formerly with the Union of Concerned Scientists and now at the Center for Food Safety, asserted in 2014, “There’s no real consensus on GMO crop safety.” In 2012, a statement issued by the Friends of the Earth in Europe demanded a moratorium on all foods derived from biotech crops. That FOE statement declared, “As well as posing unnecessary risks to human health, Friends of the Earth Europe believes GMOs destroy biodiversity, lead to increased costs for conventional farmers, increase corporate control of the food chain, and fail to combat global hunger.” In 2013, Daniel M. Ocampo, Sustainable Agriculture and Genetic Engineering Campaigner for Greenpeace in Southeast Asia, stated, “There is no scientific proof that GMOs pose no danger to human health and the environment.” Ocampo added, “Even the scientific community is divided on whether GMOs are safe.”

  All of these statements by representatives from the world’s leading environmentalist organizations are false. There is, in fact, a broad scientific consensus that modern biotech crop varieties are safe for people and the environment. Why, then, are prominent environmentalist groups opposed to this technology? That takes a bit of history to explain.

  Biotech Born Precautionary

  Biotechnology was born precautionary, and that’s been a problem ever since. Modern biotechnology got its start in 1971 when Stanford University biochemist Paul Berg figured out how to splice segments of DNA together. He called this process recombining, and it enabled researchers to move genes from one organism to another. In 1980 Berg won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for this discovery. This new capability made some researchers uncomfortable, so a committee of prominent molecular biologists published a letter in the journal Science in July 1974 asking for a worldwide moratorium on certain types of gene-splicing experiments. The moratorium was supposed to last until the hazards that might be posed by gene splicing could be assessed. The researchers also asked that the National Institutes of Health devise a set of safety procedures for working with recombinant DNA. This was the first self-imposed ban on basic research in the history of science and it lasted two years.

  Naturally, the moratorium attracted the attention of a wide variety of activists, many of whom worried about researchers playing God with nature. Some warned that super-plagues would escape the laboratories. Alarmed members of Congress including Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Representative Al Gore (D-TN) proposed significant and burdensome regulation, including the creation of a National Biohazards Commission modeled on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

  In 1976, The New York Times Magazine published an alarming front-page article, “New Strains of Life—or Death,” by Cornell University biochemist Liebe Cavalieri. Cavalieri asserted, among other horrors, that gene splicing could lead to accidental outbreaks of infectious cancer. “In the case of recombinant DNA, it is an all or none situation—only one accident is needed to endanger the future of mankind,” he warned.

  Also in 1976, Alfred Vellucci, the mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, guided by the left-leaning group Science for the People, wanted to ban gene-splicing research in his city. Of course, Cambridge is home to Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We want to be damned sure the people of Cambridge won’t be affected by anything that could crawl out of that laboratory,” Vellucci told The New York Times. He added, “They may come up with a disease that can’t be cured—even a monster. Is this the answer to Dr. Frankenstein’s dream?” There is no little irony that today Cambridge promotes itself as “one of the world’s major biotech centers.” Needless to say, more than forty years after gene splicing was invented, no plagues, much less epidemics of infectious cancer, have emerged from the world’s biotech labs.

  In the context of this furor, some 140 molecular biologists convened in 1975 at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California, to draft guidelines for conducting gene-splicing experiments. They self-consciously thought that they were avoiding what they saw as the mistakes made a generation earlier by Manhattan Project nuclear physicists when they unleashed the power of the atom. The initially restrictive guidelines have been greatly relaxed, not least because it turns out that microorganisms are natural and promiscuous exchangers of genes.

  Reflecting later on the hysteria and rush to regulate, James Watson, codiscoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA, for which he won the Nobel Prize, succinctly noted, “Scientifically I was a nut. There is no evidence at all that recombinant DNA poses the slightest danger.” Similarly, biophysicist Burke Zimmerman, who participated in the congressional debates over regulating biotechnology, concluded, “In looking back, it would be hard to insist that a law was necessary, or, perhaps, that guidelines were necessary.”

  “We Shall Not Be Cloned”

  However, once fears are raised, they are hard to allay, especially if some groups find them useful for advancing other agendas. One master promoter of fear is onetime radical organizer Jeremy Rifkin, who early on became an anti-biotech campaigner. In 1977, Rifkin led a group of protesters into a meeting of molecular biologists at the National Academy of Sciences, where they joined hands singing, “We shall not be cloned.” Also in 1977, Rifkin and his fellow activist Ted Howard published Who Should Play God? The Artificial Creation of Life and What It Means for the Future of the Human Race. “The traditional notion of ruthlessly exploiting and controlling nature in the name of progress is being challenged by an environmentalist creed that emphasizes a reintegration into the ecosystem,” wrote Rifk
in and Howard. They also railed against “unbridled scientific and technological progress” and creeping “corporate hegemony” and called for a “new spiritual awakening,” which would produce “a fundamental change in the values and institutional relationships of American society.”

  In 1984, Rifkin penned a semi-mystical tract, Algeny: A New Word—A New World, in which he disparaged biotechnology by likening it to medieval alchemy. Modern technology was alienating humanity from nature, argued Rifkin. “Humanity seeks the elation that goes with the drive for mastery over the world,” he asserted. “Nature offers us the sublime resignation that goes with an undifferentiated participation in the world around us.”10 Nature may indeed offer sublimity, but it also deals out plague, floods, droughts, and starvation quite liberally. In a review, Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould correctly decried Algeny “as a cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship.”

  Rifkin established the Foundation on Economic Trends, from which he launched many protests and legal challenges against the nascent biotechnology industry. For example, he challenged researchers who wanted to field-test a genetically modified version of the ubiquitous Pseudomonas syringae bacteria as a way to prevent frost damage to crops. The natural bacteria carry a gene that causes ice crystals to form around them when temperatures drop below freezing so that they can dine on the frost-damaged plants. Researchers had simply removed the gene and wanted to spread the modified bacteria over crops in the field to see if it would protect against frost damage. In what would later become a standard operating procedure for opponents of biotech, members of the group Earth First! ripped up one of the test plots in 1987. Eventually research showed that the modified bacteria did protect against frost damage, but efforts to commercialize it were dropped as threats to vandalize test plots persisted.