Trust Us, We're Experts PA

by Sheldon Rampton

  37 “Greenwar” (editorial), Wall Street Journal, August 11, 1999.

  38 John Vidal and David Hencke, “Genetic Food Facing Crisis,” The Guardian (London), November 18, 1998.

  39 Geoffrey Lean, “GM Foods—Victory for Grassroots Action,” The Independent (London), May 3, 1999.

  40 Quoted in Bereano and Kraus, “The Politics of Genetically Engineered Foods: The United States Versus Europe.”

  41 “Let the Harvest Begin” (attachment to a letter from Donald B. Easum of Global Business Access Ltd. on behalf of Monsanto), May 1998.

  42 Claudia Parson, “Aid Agencies Say Biotechnology Won’t End Hunger,” Reuters, September 1998.

  43 Charles Benbrook, “Evidence of the Magnitude and Consequences of the Roundup Ready Soybean Yield Drag from University-Based Varietal Trials in 1998,” Ag BioTech InfoNet Technical Paper Number 1, July 13, 1999, , (July 25, 2000).

  44 “Playing God in the Garden,” New York Times, October 25, 1998.

  45 “Allergies to Transgenic Foods” (editorial), New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 334, no. 11 (March 14, 1996), p. 726.

  46 “Playing God in the Garden,” New York Times, October 25, 1998.

  47 Mary Challender, “Sufferers Hope to Get Word Out on L-Tryptophan Illness,” Des Moines Register, October 12, 1993.

  48 Ibid.

  49 Arthur N. Mayeno et al., “Characterization of ‘Peak E,’ a Novel Amino Acid Associated with Eosinophilia-Myalgia Syndrome,” Science, vol. 250, no. 4988 (December 21, 1990), pp. 1707-1708.

  50 EMS was first identified as a disease syndrome in October 1989. FDA advisories and product recalls for L-tryptophan began in November 1989, with a more comprehensive recall issued in March 1990. For a brief synopsis of the process by which the disease was discovered and the FDA-initiated regulatory measures, see Stephen A. Gold et al., “The Clinical Impact of Adverse Event Reporting,” in Medscape Clinician Reviews, vol. 7, no. 7 (1997).

  51 For an attempt to ascertain what caused the disease, see Arthur N. Mayeno and Gerald J. Gleich, “Eosinophilia-myalgia Syndrome and Tryptophan Production: A Cautionary Tale,” Trends in Biotechnology, vol. 12, no. 9 (September 1994), pp. 346-352. Also see Hertzman, P.A., “L-tryptophan Related Eosinophilia-myalgia Syndrome,” in Drug and Device Induced Disease: Developing a Blueprint for the Future, Proceedings of a MEDWATCH Conference, January 21-22, 1994, Rockville, MD, Food and Drug Administration.

  52 Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Biotechnology and the Future of Agriculture,” New York Times, December 8, 1997.

  53 Statement delivered by Julian Edwards, Director General, Consumers International, before the Codex Committee on Food Labeling, 26th Session, Ottawa, Canada, May 26-29, 1998.

  54 Karen Charman, “America for Sale: Destruction of the Heartland,” unpublished master’s thesis, 1994 (updated).

  55 “New Study Backs Up Biotech Fears,” Inter Press Service, September 4, 1998.

  56 Carol Kaesuk Yoon, “Squash with Altered Genes Raises Fears of ‘Superweeds,’ ” New York Times, November 3, 1999.

  57 Terence Corcoran, “Attack of the Tomato Killers,” Financial Post (Canada), May 8, 1999, p. C7.

  58 David Barboza, “Biotech Companies Take On Critics of Gene-Altered Food,” New York Times, November 12, 1999, p. 1.

  59 “Greenwar” (editorial), Wall Street Journal, August 11, 1999.

  60 Andy Coghlan and Kurt Kleiner, “Spud U Dislike,” New Scientist, September 15, 1998, , (July 25, 2000).

  61 “Monster Mash,” New Scientist, February 20, 1999, , (July 25, 2000).

  62 Scott Kilman, “Food Fright: Biotech Scare Sweeps Europe, and Companies Wonder if U.S. Is Next,” Wall Street Journal, October 7, 1999, p. A1.

  63 “Biotech Crops Gain Favor on the Farm: Controversy Abroad Hasn’t Slowed Planting,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 23, 1999. “U.S. Agriculture Loses Huge Markets Thanks to GMOs,” Reuters, March 3, 1999.

  64 Rick Weiss, “Food War Claims Its Casualties,” Washington Post, September 12, 1999, p. A1.

  65 Testimony of Tim Hume, board member of the National Corn Growers Association, before the Senate Agriculture Committee, October 7, 1999.

  66 Jim Ostroff, “Genetically Modified Foods: Peril or Promise? U.S. Fight Over Bioengineering Starting to Take Shape—in Congress, in Stores, and in the Minds of Consumers,” Supermarket News, October 25, 1999.

  67 A. Birch et al., “Interactions Between Plant Resistance Genes, Pest Aphid Populations and Beneficial Aphid Predators,” 1996/1997 Scottish Crop Res. Inst. Annual Report, Dundee, pp. 68-72; A. Hilbeck et al., “Effects of Transgenic Bacillus thuringiensis Corn-Fed Prey on Mortality and Development Time of Immature Chrysoperla carnea (Neuroptera: Chrysopidae),” Environmental Entomology no. 27 (1998), pp. 480-487. Deepak Saxena, Saul Flores, and G. Stotzky, “Transgenic Plants: Insecticidal Toxin in Root Exudates from Bt Corn,” Nature, no. 402 (December 2, 1999), p. 480.

  68 John Frank, “Field of Bad Dreams,” PR Week, July 5, 1999, p. 17.

  69 “Butterflies and Bt Corn Pollen: Lab Research and Field Realities,” Monsanto position paper, February 15, 2000.

  70 Biotechnology Industry Organization, “Scientific Symposium to Show No Harm to Monarch Butterfly” (news release), November 2, 1999.

  71 Robert Steyer, “Scientists Discount Threat to Butterflies from Altered Corn,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 2, 1999, p. A5.

  72 Rebecca Goldburg, “Industry Manipulation of Research Results on Bt Corn and Monarchs,” November 4, 1999, e-mail to distribution list.

  73 Carol Kaesuk Yoon, “No Consensus on the Effects of Engineering on Corn Crops,” New York Times, November 4, 1999.

  74 David Barboza, “Biotech Companies Take on Critics of Gene-Altered Foods,” New York Times, November 12, 1999, p. 1.

  75 Camillo Fracassini, “Food Row: Scientist ‘Sacked’ Over Data Mistake,” The Scotsman, August 13, 1998, p. 1.

  76 S. W. B. Ewen and Arpad Pusztai, “Effects of Diets Containing Genetically Modified Potatoes Expressing Galanthus Nivalis Lectin on Rat Small Intestines,” The Lancet, no. 354 (1999), pp. 1353-1354. Not all of Pusztai’s research points to problems with GM foods. In 1999 he published a study in the Journal of Nutrition which examined the effect of a different lectin transgene inserted into peas and found no adverse affects. See Arpad Pusztai, G. Grant, S. Bardocz, R. Alonso, M. J. Chrispeels, H. E. Schroeder, L. M. Tabe and T. J. V. Higgins, “Expression of the Insecticidal Bean Alpha-amylase Inhibitor Transgene Has Minimal Detrimental Effect on the Nutritional Value of Peas Fed to Rats at 30% of the Diet,” Journal of Nutrition, no. 129 (1999), pp. 1597-1603.

  77 Robin McKie, “Why Britain’s Scientific Establishment Got So Ratty with This Gentle Boffin,” The Observer, October 17, 1999, p. 10.

  78 Laurie Flynn and Michael Sean Gillard, “Pro-GM Food Scientist ‘Threatened Editor, ’ ” The Guardian (London), November 1, 1999.

  79 “BetterFoods.org—Who We Are,” , (July 25, 2000).

  80 1999 O’Dwyer’s Directory of Public Relations Firms (New York, NY: J. R. O’Dwyer Co., Inc., 1999) lists all clients but Philip Morris, who is listed in 1999 Washington Representatives (New York, NY: Columbia Books, Inc., 1999).

  81 Telephone interview by Karen Charman with Brian Sansoni, October 27, 1999.

  82 Stephen Rouse, “GM Scientist Defends Himself on Internet,” Aberdeen Press and Journal, June 14, 1999, p. 2.

  83 Jose L. Domingo, “Health Risks of GM Foods: Many Opinions but Few Data,” Science, vol. 288 (June 9, 2000), pp. 1748-1749.

  PART THREE—THE EXPERTISE INDUSTRY (PREFACE)

  1 Elizabeth MacDonald and Scot J. Paltrow, “Merry-Go-Round: Ernst & Young Advised the Client, but Not About Everything,” Wall Street Journal, August 10, 1999, p. A1.

  2 Ibid.

  3 See Brian Martin, Confronting t
he Experts (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 5, 175-176.

  CHAPTER 8: THE BEST SCIENCE MONEY CAN BUY

  1 Robert N. Proctor, Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know About Cancer (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1995), p. 9.

  2 Frank Wolfs, “Appendix E: Introduction to the Scientific Method,” , (July 25, 2000).

  3 Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science (London: MacMillan, 1896). A statistician, Pearson invented the chi-square test of statistical significance. “The scientific method,” he wrote, “consists in the careful and often laborious classification of facts, the comparison of their relationships and sequences, and finally in the discovery by aid of the disciplined imagination of a brief statement or formula, which in a few words resumes a wide range of facts. Such a formula is called a scientific law” (The Grammar of Science, p. 77). “The man who classifies facts of any kind whatever, who sees their mutual relation and describes their sequences, is applying the scientific method and is a man of science,” he stated. “The facts may belong to the past history of mankind, to the social statistics of our great cities, to the atmosphere of the most distant stars, to the digestive organs of a worm or to the life of a scarcely visible bacillus. It is not the facts themselves which make science, but the method by which they are dealt with” (The Grammar of Science, Part 1, 12). His preoccupation with statistical correlations made him a prominent exponent of the “biometrical movement,” which sought to measure traits within populations, and also a leading figure in developing the racist pseudoscience of eugenics. “History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced,” he stated, “namely the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race. . . . My view—and I think it may be called the scientific view of a nation—is that of an organized whole, kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races” (Karl Pearson, National Life from the Standpoint of Science, 2nd Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919).

  4 Gordon D. Hunter, Scrapie and Mad Cow Disease (New York: Vantage Press, 1993), pp. 25-26.

  5 “Peer Review: Reforms Needed to Ensure Fairness in Federal Agency Grant Selection,” General Accounting Office, June 24, 1994, GAO/PEMD-94-1.

  6 Horace Freeland Judson, “Structural Transformations of the Sciences and the End of Peer Review,” Journal of the American Medical Association, no. 272 (July 13, 1994), pp. 92-94.

  7 Richard Smith, “Peer Review: Reform or Revolution?” British Medical Journal, no. 315 (1997), pp. 759-760.

  8 David Hanners, “Scientists Were Paid to Write Letters: Tobacco Industry Sought to Discredit EPA Report,” St. Louis Pioneer Dispatch, August 4, 1998.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Charles Ornstein, “Fen-phen Maker Accused of Funding Journal Articles,” Dallas Morning News, May 23, 1999, p. 1A.

  11 Ibid.

  12 Robert Bell, Impure Science: Fraud, Compromise and Political Influence in Scientific Research (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1992), pp. 190-219.

  13 Brooke T. Mossman and J. Bernard L. Gee, “Asbestos-related Diseases,” New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 320, no. 26 (June 29, 1989), pp. 1721-1730. For a detailed critique of this incident, see Paul Brodeur and Bill Ravanesi, “Old Tricks,” The Net-worker (newsletter of the Science and Environmental Health Network), June 1998.

  14 For NEJM’s response to the controversy over this incident, see Marcia Angell and Jerome P. Kassirer, “Editorials and Conflicts of Interest,” New England Journal of Medicine, no. 335 (1996), pp. 1055-1056. For the researchers’ side, see JoAnn E. Mason, “Adventures in Scientific Discourse,” Epidemiology, vol. 8, no. 3 (May 1997).

  15 Jerry H. Berke, “Living Downstream” (book review), New England Journal of Medicine, no. 337 (1997), p. 1562.

  16 Nate Blakeslee, “Carcinogenic Cornucopia,” Texas Observer, January 30, 1998.

  17 “Medical Journal Apologizes for Ethics Blunder,” Washington Post, December 28, 1997.

  18 Sheldon Krimsky et al., “Scientific Journals and Their Authors’ Financial Interests: A Pilot Study,” Psychother Psychosom, vol. 67, nos. 4-5 (July-October 1998), pp. 194-201.

  19 Reported in Ralph T. King, “Medical Journals Rarely Disclose Researchers’Ties, Drawing Ire,” Wall Street Journal, February 2, 1999. See also Sheldon Krimsky, “Will Disclosure of Financial Interests Brighten the Image of Entrepreneurial Science?” (Abstract A-29), in 1999 AAAS Annual Meeting and Science Innovation Exposition: Challenges for a New Century, C. J. Boyd, ed., American Association for the Advancement of Science.

  20 Lisa A. Bero, Alison Galbraith, and Drummond Rennie, “The Publication of Sponsored Symposiums in Medical Journals,” New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 327, no. 16 (October 15, 1992), pp. 1135-1140.

  21 Cynthia Crossen, Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), pp. 183-184.

  22 David Shenk, “Money + Science = Ethics Problems On Campus,” The Nation, March 22, 1999, p. 14.

  23 David Ozonoff, “The Political Economy of Cancer Research,” Science and Nature, no. 2 (1979), p. 15.

  24 Percy W. Bridgman, Reflections of a Physicist (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1950), pp. 294-296, 299-300. Quoted in Lewis A. Coser, Men of Ideas: A Sociologist’s View (New York, NY: Free Press, 1970), pp. 300-301.

  25 Stephen Hilgartner, Richard C. Bell, and Rory O’Connor, Nukespeak: The Selling of Nuclear Technology in America (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 25-35.

  26 Coser, p. 306.

  27 Ibid., p. 308.

  28 Quoted in Susan Lederer, remarks at AAAS symposium on Secrecy in Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, March 29, 1999.

  29 Alvin M. Weinberg, “Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy,” Science, vol. 177, no. 4043, July 7, 1972, p. 34. Quoted in Hilgartner, p. 58.

  30 J. Gustave Speth, Arthur R. Tamplin, and Thomas B. Cochran, “Plutonium Recycle: The Fateful Step,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. XXX, no. 9, November 1974, p. 20. Quoted in Hilgartner, p. 58. The half-life of plutonium, by the way, is 24,400 years.

  31 New York Times, May 20, 1948, p. 2. Cited in Hilgartner, p. 101.

  32 World Health Organization (WHO), Mental Health Aspects of the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, Report of a Study Group, Technical Report Series no. 151, Geneva, 1958, p. 6. Also annex 1, “Statement of the Sub-committee on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy of the World Federation for Mental Health, approved by the 25th Meeting of the Executive Board of the WFMH, London, 8-12 February 1957,” pp. 47-48. Quoted in Hilgartner et al., p. 102.

  33 Ibid., p. 31.

  34 Ibid., pp. 31, 33.

  35 Hilgartner, p. 103.

  36 Ritchie Calder, Living With the Atom (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 24-25. Quoted in Hilgartner et al., p. 103.

  37 Dorothy Nelkin, Science As Intellectual Property: Who Controls Scientific Research? (New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1984), pp. 85-86.

  38 George Rathjens, “The Role of the Scientist in Military Preparedness,” from Warfare in the 1990s (conference proceedings), October 1981, , (July 25, 2000).

  39 Theodore H. White, “The Action Intellectuals,” Life, June 9, June 16, June 23, 1967. Cited in Frank Fischer, Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 1990), p. 152.

  40 “U.S. Expenditures for Research and Development by Source of Funds and Performer,” Wall Street Journal Almanac 1999 (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1998), p. 363.

  41 Dorothy Nelkin, Science As Intellectual Property: Who Controls Scientific Research? (New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1984), pp. 18-21.

  42 “Industry Trends in Research Support and Link
s to Public Research,” National Science Board, 1998, , (July 25, 2000).

  43 Melissa B. Robinson, “Medical School Faculty Say Budget Cuts Are Hurting Teaching,” Associated Press, May 19, 1999.

  44 Carl Irving, “UC Berkeley’s Experiment in Research Funding,” National Crosstalk, Fall 1999, , (July 25, 2000).

  45 Ibid.

  46 Remarks by Laura Nader, delivered at AAAS symposium on Secrecy in Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, March 29, 1999,