Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

On January 1, 2004, Denmark introduced legislation to restrict trans fats to no more than 2 percent of the total fat in any food. Consumption of trans fats fell from 4.5 grams a day per person in 1975 to 2.2 grams in 1993 to 1.5 grams in 1995 to almost 0 grams by 2005. By 2010, the incidence of heart disease and related deaths in Denmark had dropped 60 percent.

If every farmer in every country on every continent in the world used every inch of fertile land, sprinkled their fields with natural fertilizers, meticulously rotated their crops, and convinced everyone to eat a vegetarian diet, they could feed about four billion people. But, as of 2016, more than seven billion people roamed the Earth.

More than three billion people alive today—and billions more in the future—owe their existence to Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch.

(“The trouble with the world is not that people know too little,” wrote Mark Twain, “it’s that they know so many things that ain’t so.”)

In part because of antibiotics, we live 30 years longer than we did a hundred years ago.

Also, if you’re going to say that animal studies predict events in people, then we should stop eating chocolate, which can cause heart arrhythmias and occasionally death in dogs.

These small quantities of mercury aren’t harmful. Only large quantities are harmful. If small quantities of mercury were harmful, we’d have to move to a different planet.

Unfortunately, we seem incapable of learning the most important lesson in toxicology: The dose makes the poison.

Indeed, about 50 percent of men more than 60 years old have been found at autopsy to have prostate cancer after they had died from something else; in men more than 85 years old, that number climbs to 75 percent.

(The legal aphorism is that when the law is on your side, argue the law; when the facts are on your side, argue the facts; when neither is on your side, attack the witness.)