Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

Trans fats are also still contained in some brands of margarines and coffee creamers. And they’re still contained in Berger cookies. The key to avoiding the problem of hidden trans fats is to look for the phrase “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil” on the nutrition label.

John Harvey Kellogg, who operated a health sanatorium that offered fanciful foods for the wealthy, founded the Race Betterment Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan. 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.” Espousing a common belief of his time, Kellogg said that those destined for abnormality had been “begotten in lust.”

With the support of wealthy philanthropists, influential citizens, and respected academics, the eugenics movement in the United States changed the law. Four states prohibited the marriage of alcoholics, 17 prohibited the marriage of epileptics, and 41 prohibited the marriage of those deemed feebleminded or insane. By the mid-1930s, America was the world leader in banned marriages. (Marriage restriction laws weren’t declared unconstitutional until 1967.)

Twenty years later, the United States Supreme Court’s verdict in Buck v. Bell would be presented in support of SS officer Otto Hofmann during the Nuremberg Military Tribunal investigating Nazi war crimes.

During his nine months in prison, Hitler had read several books by American eugenicists, calling his prison stay “his university.” Hitler would soon launch a national movement that would forever damn the field of eugenics to the lower reaches of hell. But, despite popular belief, what was about to happen in Germany didn’t start on a rallying stand in Munich; it started in a law office in New York City.

To say that Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race had influenced Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf would be an understatement; in some sections, Hitler had virtually plagiarized Grant’s book.

In 1936, three years after Adolf Hitler came to power, the Nazi Party listed Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race as essential reading.

Within a year, 56,000 Germans had been sterilized; by 1935, 73,000; by 1939, 400,000, dwarfing the number of sterilizations performed in the United States. The procedure was so common that it had a nickname: Hitlerschnitte, “Hitler’s cut.” Americans took note. Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital, lamented, “Hitler is beating us at our own game!”

AMERICAN EUGENICISTS EMBRACED Hitler’s efforts. Both the Carnegie Institute and Rockefeller Foundation supported a German scientific establishment committed to sterilization and euthanasia. Indeed, IBM provided machinery to help the Nazis sort out family pedigrees to determine who was Jewish and who wasn’t.

“Harmony among peoples comes from the true principles and attitudes of the present,” he wrote, “not from purging the past.”

her professors didn’t believe she had what it took to be a scientist. Abandoned by her mentors, she never performed another scientific experiment—and never received her Ph.D.

Carson, not White-Stevens, was given the last word. “We still talk in terms of conquest,” she said. “We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”

~Rachel Carson

And there is no denying that e-cigarettes are safer; unlike cigarettes, they don’t produce tars that cause cancer or combustibles like carbon monoxide that cause heart disease. “People smoke for the nicotine but they die from the tar,” said Michael Russell, a pioneer of nicotine-cessation treatments.

(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.)

When Pandora’s curiosity got the best of her, she opened the forbidden box, unknowingly allowing hunger, pestilence, sickness, poverty, crime, and vice to escape into the world. Only one thing remained—hope. When Pandora opened the box again, hope also entered the world, with a lot of catching up to do.

Today, although the terms have changed, the concepts remain the same. Now the evils released from Pandora’s box have more specific names like pests, vermin, bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites, toxins, cancer, heart disease, and pain—all of which have inflicted suffering or limited lives.