Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

“Invention does not consist of creating out of void, but out of chaos.”

“Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

Pain, argued Portenoy, should now be the fifth vital sign (in addition to temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, and respiratory rate).

During the next 20 years, three major studies involving 300,000 people and costing about $100 million determined the relationship between dietary fat and heart disease. The answer: There wasn’t any.

Americans were told to eat margarine instead of butter. Unfortunately, margarine contained a type of fat (trans fats) that was far more dangerous than anyone could have possibly imagined.

Saturated fats increase the not-so-bad type of LDL cholesterol but don’t increase the very bad vLDL cholesterol.