The story with breast cancer research is much the same as the story with research into other types of cancer. Instead of prevention, researchers focus on the basic cellular research or on various treatments for women who already have the disease. The major treatments are surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation—termed “slash, poison, and burn” techniques by Dr. Susan Love, a breast surgeon at the University of California at Los Angeles and author of Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book.48 Prior to the 1980s, in fact, no major studies on preventing breast cancer had ever been approved by the National Institutes of Health, the clearinghouse that awards the bulk of U.S. government medical research grants. NIH officials note that funding for breast cancer research has increased consistently since that time, but even in recent years several promising studies have been rejected, postponed, or abandoned.
Women and Children First
“It is obvious that the battleground for chlorine will be women’s issues—reproductive health and children,” Jack Mongoven observed in his 1994 memorandum to the Chlorine Chemistry Council. To counter the recommendations of scientists like Devra Lee Davis, he advised the CCC to mobilize the third party technique behind a campaign to create the impression that the pro-industry status quo was essential to public health. “It is especially important to begin a program directed to pediatric groups throughout the country and to counter activist claims of chlorine-related health problems in children,” he wrote. “Prevent medical associations from joining anti-chlorine movement. Create panel of eminent physicians and invite them to review data regarding chlorine as a health risk and as a key chemical in pharmaceuticals and medical devices. Publish panel’s findings and distribute them widely to medical associations and publications. Stimulate peer-reviewed articles for publication in JAMA [the Journal of the American Medical Association] on the role of chlorine chemistry in treating disease. . . . Convince through carefully crafted meetings of industry representatives (in pharmaceuticals) with organizations devoted to specific illnesses, e.g., arthritis, cystic fibrosis, etc., that the cure for their specific disease may well come through chlorine chemistry and ask them to pass resolutions endorsing chlorine chemistry and communicate their resolutions to medical societies.”
“I think of myself as jaded,” said Charlotte Brody of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice after reviewing MBD’s leaked documents, “but it still takes my breath away to see a professional, totally amoral directive that editorial visits be done because the scientific information that Devra Lee Davis has is too dangerous to go unfiltered.” Brody was also struck by MBD’s “recommendations that the chlorine industry should go to health groups and sign them up to defend the benefits of chlorine, without telling them what they are really signing up for, and before we can get to them and talk about how dioxins and other endocrine disrupters are harming their health. MBD doesn’t suggest going out and talking about why dioxin isn’t as dangerous as we say. Instead, it’s a much more clever and insidious strategy, where they sign up people with cystic fibrosis to defend the benefits of chlorine chemistry by suggesting to them that without chlorine there will never be a cure for their disease. They don’t even bring up dioxin, but they falsely suggest that we would bring an end to pharmaceutical research.”
The CCC and other chemical-industry trade associations appear to be following Mongoven’s advice. In December 1994—three months after Mongoven advised the CCC to “mobilize science against the precautionary principle”—the National Journal reported that the CCC “has increased its budget substantially. The council this year amassed a lobbying and public relations war chest of about $12 million—compared with about $2 million in 1993—from such members as Dow Chemical Co. and Occidental Chemical Co. The campaign to defend chlorine could expand to $15 million in 1995, according to a recent report in Chemical and Engineering News.” About a third of that budget was being spent on research, such as financing a “scientific review panel” to challenge the conclusions of the EPA’s dioxin reassessment. “In anticipation of the EPA report, the council hired Ketchum Public Relations to orchestrate a 30-city tour last summer in which scientists sympathetic with the industry’s positions met with news media representatives and community leaders to play down fears about dioxin,” the National Journal reported.49
“We identified a number of independent scientists and took them on the road,” explained Mark Schannon, an associate director of Ketchum’s Washington office. In this context, of course, “independent” means pro-industry, as Schannon tacitly admitted. “Basically what we’re trying to do is assure that industry’s voice is heard by people who make policy decisions,” he said.50
“After a year and a half of fighting regulatory and legislative threats, the Chlorine Chemistry Council . . . says it is shifting to a longer range goal of building a science base from which to argue its case,” reported the trade publication Chemical Week, quoting CCC operating committee chairman Leon Anziano, who said, “We want to move from firefighting to long-term advocacy of sound science.”51
The CCC is only one of several industry groups that have mobilized to fight the chlorine war. Others include the Chlorine Institute, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, the Vinyl Institute, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Each of these has a public relations budget, and staff to write newspaper op-ed pieces, testify before Congress or the EPA, appear on news shows as “experts,” and speak to civic groups. In addition to Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin, other PR firms that have been hired as footsoldiers include Goddard*Claussen/First Tuesday; the Jefferson Group; John Adams Associates; Keller & Heckman; Ketchum Communications; and Nichols Dezenhall.52
The pesticide, plastics, pulp and paper, household products, oil, and cosmetics industries have all mobilized to defend chlorine chemistry against its environmentalist critics. The food industry has also weighed in, mindful that dioxin accumulates in fatty tissue and is therefore omnipresent in meat and dairy products. Coordinated by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the food industry’s “Dioxin Working Group” includes the National Milk Producers’ Federation, American Society of Animal Science, National Broiler Council, National Turkey Federation, International Dairy Foods Association, American Sheep Industry Association, National Pork Producers Council, American Meat Institute, National Renderers Association, American Farm Bureau Federation, and the National Food Processors Association. In his report to the CCC, Mongoven noted that these groups “have a history of strong relations with the Agriculture Department, and it’s certain they will use these solid ties to put pressure on EPA through Agriculture.”53
I Love Danger
In addition to bringing pressure to bear on the chlorine issue itself, Mongoven advised the Chlorine Chemistry Council to take measures that would directly attack the precautionary principle. “Bring the state governors in on the issue of risk assessment by communicating the benefits to them from being able to rely on a national standard,” he advised. “Establish third-party entities devoted to developing these standards in the near future. Take steps to discredit the precautionary principle within the more moderate environmental groups as well as within the scientific and medical communities.”54
In 1999 alone, industry-allied groups mounted at least two forums aimed at attacking the precautionary principle. On June 3 and 4, 1999, the heavily industry-funded Harvard Center for Risk Analysis hosted a conference titled “The Precautionary Principle: Refine It or Replace It?” Funders of the conference included the CCC and the Chemical Manufacturers Association, along with the right-wing Koch Foundation, funded by Koch Industries, one of the largest oil pipeline operators in the United States and a notorious polluter.55 In January 2000, Koch Industries agreed to pay a record $35 million in civil fines and restitution for hundreds of oil leaks in six states, the largest fine ever imposed on a single company for violations of the Clean Water Act.
Promotional material for the conference noted that the precautionary principle “is playing an i
ncreasingly influential role in public policy toward technologies that pose potential risks to public health, safety and natural resources. The principle is invoked frequently in Europe, and it is now beginning to enter policy discussions in North American and Asia. . . . Concerns have been raised that the precautionary principle may be too simplistic to guide decision-makers facing complex choices involving technologies with uncertain risks, benefits and costs to current and future generations. . . . We will . . . examine the role of the precautionary principle in the following regulatory case studies: biotechnology, synthetic chemicals, electric and magnetic fields, and global climate change.”
Recognizing again the important role that women would play in the debate, Mongoven advised that “an ideal partnership to undertake such a national debate” on the precautionary principle “would be the League of Women Voters and the American Chemical Society. These two organizations could in turn attract other credible organizations—and even accept corporate donations for the project—without jeopardizing their credibility. Clearly, given the issue’s importance to women’s organizations and children’s welfare organizations, these and reasonable environmental groups also should be encouraged to participate.” Perhaps the League of Women Voters turned out to be unavailable. Instead, an antifeminist lobby group called the Independent Women’s Forum, which receives 90 percent of its funding from the conservative Olin, Coors, Bradley, and Carthage Foundations, hosted a conference titled “Scared Sick” in February 1999 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. IWF’s science adviser, psychiatrist Sally Satel, opened the event by commenting that “women, as a group, tend to be more risk-averse. That’s why the IWF has chosen to explore the relationship between unjustified fears and health and science policy.”56
The leadoff panel was an attack on the precautionary principle moderated by Neal B. Freeman, CEO of the Blackwell Corporation and producer of the PBS show “TechnoPolitics.” Freeman echoed Mongoven’s complaint about “holistic mind-sets” and the death of “linear thinking” before warming to the main theme of the day. The precautionary principle, he said, “jumped the ocean about ten years ago in the campaign to suppress the chlorine chemistry industry. Now it pervades policy debates. It informs—or misinforms—the global warming debate, the debate over the biotechnology industry, and . . . the whole cluster of women’s health issues. We can be thankful that the precautionary principle does not yet govern our creative lives. If it did, Columbus would not have discovered this continent, Thomas Edison would not have illuminated it, and Philo T. Farnsworth would not have transmitted television pictures of it.”
“If we must ensure that things are safe, how are we ever to cross streets?” fretted panelist David Murray of the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS), a conservative think tank that markets itself to journalists as an expert source for interpreting statistical and scientific news. “Must every pedestrian be so outfitted as to survive an encounter with the Metrobus?” Murray asked. “And how do we understand the potential benefits of certain things that are unforeseen? . . . The precautionary principle was mercifully never adopted by life on earth at its inception. After all, most mutations are deleterious. . . . What we have had to be most adapted for, as a species, is change itself.”
“The precautionary principle itself is a hazard both to our health and our high standard of living,” added panelist Elizabeth Whelan of the industry-funded American Council on Science and Health, arguing that efforts to fight pollution could lead to a collapse in the American standard of living, thereby creating “more poverty, more people without health insurance, and less access to health care generally. . . . Go back to what your mother said: ‘When in doubt, throw the precautionary principle out.’ ” Apparently the mothers of Murray and Whelan gave different advice than most moms, who usually advise their kids to look both ways before crossing the street, and who use the phrase “when in doubt, throw it out” as a precautionary principle for avoiding questionable foods.
The hypocrisy in these attacks on “environmentalist scaremongering” is that the attackers themselves rely heavily on rhetorical appeals to exaggerated fears. Will the economy really collapse if we protect kids from air pollution? Does “holistic thinking” really mean an end to scientific progress and Western civilization?
Jack Mongoven’s hostility to the precautionary principle is ironic because he himself is a practitioner of the precautionary principle with respect to the reputations and profits of his clients. MBD does not wait to be called before responding to the activist menace. Its ongoing surveillance of environmental, consumer, and church groups is designed to anticipate criticisms of his clients long before those criticisms are even aired in the news or other public forums. “It is important in all cases to stay ahead of the activists,” he advised the Chlorine Chemistry Council.
In its campaigns against environmentalists and consumer groups, Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin has helped create its own form of fearmongering in which industry appears as an innocent giant under attack from “radicals” who, in the words of MBD’s Ronald Duchin, “want to change the system; have underlying socio/political motives,” and see multinational corporations as “inherently evil. . . . These organizations do not trust the . . . federal, state and local governments to protect them and to safeguard the environment. They believe, rather, that individuals and local groups should have direct power over industry.” In one memo to the chlorine industry, Mongoven argues that concerns about endocrine disruptors reflect “a grand strategy . . . to give Greenpeace a strong lead on the issues but to use various groups—some of which are more acceptable to the mainstream—to appear to lead specific issues, thus giving the overall campaign the appearance of a widespread, generally accepted grassroots uprising against chlorine chemistry.”
7
Attack of the Killer Potatoes
My guess is that for most people who have concerns about this, their concerns are based on the question of whether we are going to use these technologies wisely, whether we have the wisdom to keep up with our scientific capabilities. And there have been enough precedents when humanity has at best muddled through the application of new technology in ways that are sometimes frightening, nuclear technology being the most obvious example.
—Robert Shapiro, former CEO of Monsanto1
For Dr. Arpad Pusztai, two and a half minutes was all it took to end a 36-year career.
“It was timed. It was 150 seconds,” Pusztai says of his August 1998 appearance on the British television program World in Action. “All I said was that we had come across a bizarre surprise finding when we ran experiments to test what happened to animals who ate genetically modified potatoes. Then the whole world caved in around me.”2
Pusztai, a mild-mannered research biologist, is the son of a highly decorated Hungarian war hero who led the resistance against Nazi occupation during World War II. “They put a high price on his head, but that didn’t stop him from doing what he knew was right,” Pusztai recalls. His father was equally outspoken against the communist regime that took power at war’s end, and when the Soviet army invaded Hungary in 1956 to crush a citizen uprising, young Arpad fled the country. By then he had already established a name for himself as a scientist, and after several months of living in Austrian refugee camps, he accepted a scholarship from the Ford Foundation that enabled him to live and study where he wanted. He selected England, he recalls now with some irony, because he believed it was a tolerant country.
After completing his doctorate in London’s Lister Institute of Preventative Medicine, Pusztai was recruited to work at the prestigious Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, where he published more than 270 scientific papers and became known as the world’s leading expert on lectins, a class of carbohydrate-binding proteins. Lectins are present in most plants, especially cereals, potatoes, and beans. Some lectins are toxic, but others are safe for humans and other mammals. During the late 1980s, Pusztai spent six years studying a particular type of lectin taken
from snowdrop bulbs. The “snowdrop lectin,” also known as GNA, killed insect pests but proved safe even when fed to test animals in high concentrations. Pusztai’s research therefore attracted intense interest as a possible safe way to develop genetically modified food crops that would resist insects but remain safe for human consumption. Pusztai’s ability to attract research funding was considered so valuable that he was asked to stay on at Rowett after retirement age. In 1995, his expertise helped the Rowett Institute beat out 27 contenders to win a government contract to “identify genes . . . which will be suitable for transfer into plants to enhance their resistance towards insect and nematode pests, but will have minimum impact on non-target, beneficial organisms, the environment, livestock fed on these plants, and which will present no health risks for humans.”
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