(5 reviews) Author: Thomas O. McGarity ISBN : 9780674047143 New from $24.70 Format: PDFWhat do we know about the possible poisons that industrial technologies leave in our air and water? How reliable is the science that federal regulators and legislators use to protect the public from dangerous products? As this disturbing book shows, ideological or economic attacks on research are part of an extensive pattern of abuse.
Thomas O. McGarity and Wendy Wagner reveal the range of sophisticated legal and financial tactics political and corporate advocates use to discredit or suppress research on potential human health hazards. Scientists can find their research blocked, or find themselves threatened with financial ruin. Corporations, plaintiff attorneys, think tanks, even government agencies have been caught suppressing or distorting research on the safety of chemical products.
With alarming stories drawn from the public record, McGarity and Wagner describe how advocates attempt to bend science or “spin” findings. They reveal an immense range of tools available to shrewd partisans determined to manipulate research.
Bending Science exposes an astonishing pattern of corruption and makes a compelling case for reforms to safeguard both the integrity of science and the public health.
- Paperback: 400 pages
- Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 15, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0674047141
- ISBN-13: 978-0674047143
- Product Dimensions: 1.1 x 5.6 x 8.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research PDF
When I took Professor McGarity's administrative law class at the University of Texas many, many years ago, the lectures were notable chiefly as brief intermissions where I could doze off in the semi-comfortable chairs of the law school. The fault was hardly his. An excellent lecturer and acknowledged expert in administrative law, my narcolepsy had more to do with juggling school, work, a young marriage and a younger child.
Professor McGarity has teamed up with Wendy Wagner, another UT law prof who may one day wrest away the mantle of regulatory guru from McGarity himself. These two brilliant writers have unleashed a tour de force that exposes, in the powerfully understated title "Bent Science," how industry has corrupted the science upon which public health policy is based.
They could have titled it "Rape of Science," "Scruples be Damned," or "Money Can Buy You Science," but no title would equal the impact of this balanced, thoughtful, footnoted, politic, and academic sledgehammer of a book. Though the authors go out of their way to avoid using the word corrupt, no possible reading of their extensive survey can lead to any other conclusion. Industry has purchased the governmental regulatory process by vitiating the very process of science itself. This has had tremendous implications for people poisoned by toxic substances like asbestos, resulting terminal illnesses like mesothelioma.
From their careful introduction, where they lay out the problem and explain exactly what bent science means, to the final chapters where they provide practical (and a few idealistic) solutions in tandem with exhortations to optimism, this hard hitting book covers every sleazy corporate trick in the book.
This book argues that science institutions are under attack - dozens of sophisticated strategies from outcome-oriented interests (seeking a specific result favoring their product, process, etc.) are used to co-opt the science that informs public health and environmental policy. Further, policy-makers can no longer expect the scientific community to detect and filter out the distortions without assistance from the legal system. The bulk of the book is then taken up with specific examples of the abuses it is concerned about.
The first meaningful evidence of bending science in the legal world comes from the early 1900s when asbestos, tobacco, pharmaceutical, and pesticide manufacturers tried to control the bad news about their products. Suppression of industry-sponsored research and occasional harassment of independent scientists were the primary methods; in other settings manufacturers simply avoided research regarding hazards, leaving the burden to individual victims. The eventual results were new regulatory agencies (FDA and EPA) and requirements.
Outcome-oriented proponents then manufactured uncertainty about implications of well-conducted scientific studies via attacks on every minute aspect of every cited study used by experts - aimed at undermining the scientific reliability of their overall conclusions and often allowing their exclusion from court trials. Next outcome advocates than moved on to obtain legislation from 2000 - 2004 giving similar advantages dealing with regulatory agencies.
Estimates of the cumulative costs of regulatory requirements are often at least somewhat based on production lost due to particular products or wastes being banned (overstated). Regulatory agencies react slower than courts - eg.
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