Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

Six thousand years ago, the Sumerians discovered a plant called hul gil, “the plant of joy,” which gave birth to a drug that now kills 20,000 Americans every year. More young adults die from this drug than from motor vehicle accidents. In 1901, a German scientist performed an experiment that revolutionized the food industry. A hundred years later, an editorial in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine stated, “On a per calorie basis, [this product] appears to increase the risk of heart disease more than any other macronutrient.” The Harvard School of Public Health estimated that eliminating it from the American diet would prevent 250,000 heart-related deaths every year. In 1909, another German scientist invented a chemical reaction that won the Nobel Prize, allowed us to feed more than seven billion people across the globe, and unless we do something about it, will probably end life on this planet. In 1916, a New York City conservationist wrote a scientific treatise that caused Congress to pass a series of draconian immigration laws, enabled the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of American citizens, and provided a scientific rationale for Adolf Hitler to murder six million Jews. Echoes of this treatise can be heard today when politicians like Donald Trump denounce Mexican immigrants, calling them “rapists” and “murderers.”