Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

Between 1839 and 1860, China and Britain fought two Opium Wars. China lost both times. As a consequence, China had to open more ports for opium importation, pay Britain $21 million in reparations, and cede Hong Kong to British rule (which, by treaty, wasn’t returned to China until 1997).

Eight years after he invented the cornflake, Kellogg said, “We have wonderful new races of horses, cows, and pigs. Why should we not have a new and improved race of men? A race of human thoroughbreds.”

One exhibit, titled “Some People Are Born to Be a Burden on the Rest,” featured a series of blinking lights. One light, which flashed every 48 seconds, indicated the birth of a “defective person”; another, which flashed every 50 seconds, indicated that someone had just been sent to jail and that “very few normal people ever go to jail”; a third, which flashed only every 7 minutes, indicated the birth of a “high-grade person.” The exhibit explained that “every 15 seconds $100 of your money goes for the care of persons with bad heredity.”

Calvin Coolidge, also taken by the book, said that America must cease to become “a dumping ground for advancing hordes of aliens.”

In 1969, Wisconsin and Arizona banned DDT; so did Michigan, which published a formal obituary in a local newspaper: “Died. DDT, age 95: a persistent pesticide and onetime humanitarian. Considered to be one of World War II’s greatest heroes, DDT saw its reputation fade after it was charged with murder by author Rachel Carson. Death came on June 27 in Michigan after a lingering illness. Survived by dieldrin, aldrin, endrin, chlordane, heptachlor, lindane, and toxaphene. Please omit flowers.” Ironically, every one of these surviving chemicals was far more dangerous to human health than DDT.

“Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in twentieth century America,” wrote author Michael Crichton. “We knew better and we did it anyway and we let people around the world die, and we didn’t give a damn.”

Steven Novella, an assistant professor at Yale University School of Medicine, and the creator of the podcast, The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, summed it up best: “The real question here is not whether there is a GMO tomato with a fish gene, but who cares?” he wrote. “It’s not as if eating fish genes is inherently risky—people eat actual fish. Furthermore, by some estimates, people share about 70 percent of their genes with fish. You have fish genes and every plant you have ever eaten has fish genes. Get over it!”

In 2011, a review of studies in people found no evidence that low doses of BPA caused harm. The reason that studies in rodents had found that BPA had caused problems was that the rodents had been injected with BPA; injection bypassed the liver, which typically inactivates BPA within five minutes. When rodents were fed BPA instead of being injected with it, those given 40, 400, or 4,000 times the typical human exposure remained healthy.

Our fear of anything with a chemical name isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. A few years ago the comedians Penn and Teller did an experiment. They sent a friend to a fair in California to get signatures on a petition to ban dihydroxymonoxide. Hundreds of people signed the petition, convinced that the chemical was bad for you. Dihydrox means two hydrogen (H) atoms and monoxide means one oxygen (O) atom. The combination, H2O, is water. By using a chemical name, their friend was able to convince hundreds of people to ban water from the face of the Earth.

Autopsy studies confirm the problem with trying to screen for thyroid cancer. About one-third of people who have died from other causes also had thyroid cancer at autopsy.

And although their this-is-what-happens-when-you-speak-truth-to-power lament is appealing, it doesn’t mean that it’s right. As Norman Levitt, a mathematician and debunker of pseudoscience, famously said, “While Galileo was a rebel, not all rebels are Galileo”—no matter how hard they try to convince you that they are.