(From the diaries -- Plutonium Page. This diary is yet another look at how industry manages to co-opt science to suit their needs. I wrote about this last week, regarding the energy industry. The Scientific American article to which the diary refers can be purchased here.)
When I was growing up in the 60s, I remember my mom telling me how lucky we were to live in America, because other moms in Europe, pregnant around the same time she had been having kids, had been allowed to take Thalidomide for morning sickness; in America we'd had the FDA to protect us.
I wonder if patients who took Vioxx for pain relief would feel the same way today.
The June 2005 edition of Scientific American has an excellent article called "Doubt is their Product" by David Michaels, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in reading about the way corporate lobbyists exercise undue influence over the federal government and its institutions which were established to protect the consumer. This article isn't online yet, so if you don't subscribe to the print edition, you may want to look for a copy at your local library.
The article begins with a discussion of uncertainty in science:
Uncertainty is an inherent problem of science, but manufactured uncertainty is another matter entirely...<snip>...
The vilification of threatening research as "junk science" and the corresponding sanctification of industry-commissioned research as "sound science" has become nothing less than standard operating procedure in some parts of corporate America.
Michaels, an epidemiologist who served as the Dept of Energy's assistant secretary for the environment under President Clinton, goes on to discuss his experience protecting the health of workers in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. At the time he was appointed to this position, the standards for beryllium had remained the same since 1949 - standards which had been established by two scientists working for the AEC, who estimated an approximate safe level on their way to a meeting. Hence "the taxicab standard." In 1971, when OSHA was founded to protect workers in private industry, they adopted the same standard for beryllium. It was not until decades after the establishment of the taxicab standard - in the 1990s - that the DOE and OSHA acknowledged that the level was wrong and needed to be lowered.
Brush Wellman, the major producer of beryllium, stepped in and hired consultants who suggested that maybe other factors were involved. More research was surely needed to determine whether the standard needed to be lowered or not.
Fortunately for DOE workers, in the Clinton years, the department was able to say that while more research would be nice, they didn't need any more evidence to lower the limit and provide more protection for their workers. Such was not the case for those who would be protected under OSHA standards; they accepted industry's suggestion that more research was needed. And, surprisingly, Brush Wellman did spring for more research: in 2002 they paid for studies showing that beryllium can't be considered a factor in causing lung cancer, as studies conducted by the CDC would have you believe.
Michaels says:
Emphasizing uncertainty on behalf of big business has become a big business in itself. The product-defence firms have become experienced and successful consultants in epidemiology, biostatistics, and toxicology. In fact, it is now unusual for the science behind any proposed public health or environmental regulation not to be challenged, no matter how powerful the evidence.
(boldface for emphasis added by me)
This kind of thing is anothing new; corporations have always tried to exert influence over legislation or social standards. The Bush years, however, have seen some alarming changes, and Michaels summarizes some of the more obvious causes for alarm:
I believe it is fair to say that never in our history have corporate interests been as successful as they are today in shaping science policies to their desires. In 2002, for example, the Bush administration remade a committee that advises the CDC on the issue of childhood lead poisoning....(replacing) prominent researchers with individuals more likely to side with the lead industry.
Michaels finishes up with a call for a new regulatory paradigm:
A new regulatory paradigm is surely needed, but the Bush administration is heading in the wrong direction. Instead of encouraging industry groups to revise the reports of government scientists, agencies should be focusing more scrutiny on the data and analyses provided by corporate scientists and product-defense firms.
There is no doubt about that. Big corporations have way too much influence over our lives already. Michaels gives some follow-up links in his story, but I would like to give a different one here, one that I found through another DKos diary: The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which is developing a long-term plan to eliminate constitutional rights of corporations, which are not -after all - human beings, and do not have the same goals or desires for our communities as human beings have.