Editor’s Note: This article is the second in a three-part series.

by Jay Lehr, Ph.D. Science Director, The Heartland Institute, and Mike Gemmell

The Aftermath of the takeover of “Publicly” Funded Science

The banning of DDT was possible due to the concentrating of political power and money into the hands of an entrenched establishment of anti-industrial ideologues. Opponents of the takeover tried to counter as many biased scientific studies as possible, but this was a time-consuming process in which the media rarely published rebuttals to the alarmist-oriented establishment. What was needed to stop the takeover was a philosophical perspective on environmental affairs that considered people to be the highest of environmental values and a method for comparing manmade chemical contributions with those of “Mother Nature.” (That method now exists and is known as the Human Exposure / Rodent Potency [HERP] index. The nature of this index and its purpose is outlined in “Environmental Pollution and Cancer: Some Misconceptions,” Bruce Ames and Lois Swirsky Gold, in Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, ed. Jay H. Lehr, 1992) In addition, the means to spread these views with an uncooperative media were lacking at that time, (e.g., the Internet was not widely used, and Talk Radio was not in existence) and there was little understanding of how public funding of endeavors inevitably leads to the entrenching of an establishment and corrupt influence peddling. Because these issues were not widely understood at the time, the banning of DDT was just the beginning.

The DDT ban put the issue of manmade chemicals in the environment under the magnifying glass. Umberto Saffioti of the National Cancer Institute was the architect of the policy of carcinogen testing whose public statements left little doubt of where his biases were:

“I consider cancer as a social disease, largely caused by external agents which are derived from our technology…”

His perspective was staunchly opposed by one of the preeminent scientists of his day, Dr. John Higginson. Beginning in the early 1950s John Higginson wrote several seminal papers compiling cancer statistics based on geography, sex, occupation and other factors. Higginson concluded that between 65 and 90 percent of cancers were “environmental” in origin. By environmental Higginson meant factors such as: sex, dietary habits, drinking, smoking, sunbathing, etc.

However, Saffiotti in a series of announcements and non-peer reviewed internal publications of the National Cancer Institute perpetrated the misperception that “environmental” meant industrial chemicals in the environment. Prior to the public funding of science, Saffioti would have been summarily “tarred and feathered” and treated as an outcast in the scientific community for promoting nonpeer reviewed studies that paved the way to perpetrating this fraud. But several decades of degeneration in the publicly funded scientific arena had given him political status, influence over funding, and a compliant media in the palm of his hand. Because of his political clout, Saffioti was able to orchestrate the following policies:

• Assuming that animal test results for carcinogens could be simply converted to project results with humans, even though it was known to be immensely complex and poorly understood.

• Assuming that there is no threshold (i.e., no amount is safe) for a carcinogen even though there was no scientific support for this position (i.e., guilty until proven innocent).

• Weighting Positive studies (i.e., those that suggested a chemical was a carcinogen) much more heavily than negative studies.

• Assuming – when studies that contradict each other – guilt of the chemical in question must be considered more likely than innocence.

None of these assumptions had any basis in fact. However, their use led to the widespread belief that we were drowning in cancer caused by industrial chemicals, thus effectively launching the environmental regulatory machinery that we are living with today. Since most of the testing during the 1970s and beyond was done on industrial rather than naturally occurring chemicals, these criteria ensured that huge numbers of industrial chemicals would be declared carcinogens.

This controversy sent the career of Dr. Higginson into eclipse as well as silencing dissent among scientists opposed to the dictatorial policies of Saffioti and others that would follow his lead. In recent years, scientists have begun to speak out against these and other distortions, but they are almost always retired, or near retirement, so that the need of grant funding is no longer an issue for their careers. Censorship in all its ugliness is operating every day within the umbrella of publicly funded scientific endeavors. In particular, proponents of the theory of manmade global warming are using heavy handed tactics to silence dissent. However, they sanitize their censorship by relentlessly claiming a consensus on global warming. James Hansen of NASA leads the way with his particular brand of demagoguery. For over 20 years he has been pounding the global warming alarms, with manipulated data, and false predictions.