Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

In 1898, Bayer launched their new drug, calling it heroin. Aspirin, which physicians worried might cause gastritis, could be obtained by prescription only. Heroin, which was believed to be much safer, could be purchased over the counter.

Today, 80 percent of the world’s opioid prescriptions are written in the United States, even though only 5 percent of the world’s population lives there.

The key to avoiding the problem of hidden trans fats is to look for the phrase “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil” on the nutrition label.

Race is not a biological reality but a social myth; the term should be dropped in favor of ethnic group.

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

There is no Nordic or Aryan or Mexican or Muslim or Syrian race. There’s only one race: the human race.

“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

In 2008, Weston State Hospital reopened as a tourist attraction under the name Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. The asylum has now been featured on Syfy Channel’s Ghost Hunters and the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures. Apparently, it’s haunted. And the ghost doing the haunting is Walter Freeman.

During WWII, more people died from typhus than from combat.

(Liberation came too late for one Bergen-Belsen prisoner, Anne Frank, who died from typhus.)

“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.”

(“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.”)

(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.)

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Hafner, Katie. “A Breast Cancer Surgeon Who Keeps Challenging the Status Quo,” New York Times, September 28, 2015. Harding, C., F. Pompei, D. Burmistrov, et al. “Breast Cancer Screening, Incidence, and Mortality Across US Counties,” Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine 175 (2015): 1483–1489. Kaplan, K. “Screening Mammograms Don’t Prevent Breast Cancer Deaths,” Los Angeles Times, July 6, 2015.

McCullough, M. “When Mammograms Are More Harm Than Help,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 12, 2015.

Narod, S. A., J. Iqbal, V. Giannakeas, et al. “Breast Cancer Mortality After a Diagnosis of Ductal Carcinoma In Situ,” Journal of the American Medical Association Oncology, August 20, 2015.

Shute, N. “More Mammograms May Not Always Mean Fewer Cancer Deaths,” National Public Radio, July 7, 2015.

Welch, H. G., D. H. Gorski, and P. C. Albertson. “Trends in Metastatic Breast and Prostate Cancer—Lessons in Cancer Dynamics,” New England Journal of Medicine 373 (2015): 1685–1687.