Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks

by Ben Goldacre

Speaking only for myself, I am very wary of drug companies, not because I think all medicine is bad, but because I know they have hidden unflattering data and because I have seen their promotional material misrepresent science. I also happen to be very wary of GM food—but not because of any inherent flaws in the technology and not because I think it is uniquely dangerous. Somewhere between splicing in genes for products that will treat hemophilia at one end and releasing genes for antibiotic resistance into the wild at the other lies a sensible middle path for the regulation of GM, but there’s nothing desperately remarkable or uniquely dangerous about it as a technology. Despite all that, I remain extremely wary of GM for reasons that have nothing to do with the science, simply because it has created a dangerous power shift in agriculture, and “terminator seeds,” which die at the end of the season, are a way to increase farmers’ dependency, both nationally and in the developing world, while placing the global food supply in the hands of multinational corporations. If you really want to dig deeper, Monsanto is also very simply an unpleasant company (it made Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, for example).