Pandora's Lab Quotes

“History is the error we are forever correcting.” —Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“(“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.”)”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“While Galileo was a rebel, not all rebels are Galileo”—”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“Mice lie and monkeys exaggerate,” says University of Pennsylvania vaccine researcher David Weiner.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“IN 1925, MADISON GRANT’S The Passing of the Great Race was translated into German where it was read by a disgruntled corporal who had recently been sent to prison for his part in a riot against the government in Bavaria: Adolf Hitler. After reading the book, the 36-year-old revolutionary sent a fan letter to Grant: “This book is my Bible,” he wrote. 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.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“On January 1, 2004, Denmark introduced legislation to restrict trans fats to no more than 2 percent of the total fat in any food. Consumption of trans fats fell from 4.5 grams a day per person in 1975 to 2.2 grams in 1993 to 1.5 grams in 1995 to almost 0 grams by 2005. By 2010, the incidence of heart disease and related deaths in Denmark had dropped 60 percent.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“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. For example, in The Passing of the Great Race, Grant wrote, “It has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church does not transform a Negro into a white man.” In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, “But it is a scarcely conceivable fallacy of thought to believe that a Negro or a Chinese, let us say, will turn into a German because he learns German and is willing to speak the German language.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“Eugenicists argued that the country would need to sterilize the lower 10 percent of the population and to continue to sterilize the lower 10 percent until the gene pool was pure. Their initial goal was to sterilize 14 million Americans. When the dust settled, 65,370 poor, syphilitic, feebleminded, insane, alcoholic, deformed, lawbreaking, or epileptic Americans in 32 states had been sterilized. California alone was responsible for more than 20,000 of them. Few, if any, Americans rose in protest. It was one of the darkest moments in American history.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“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.)”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“— PAULING’S ADVOCACY GAVE BIRTH TO a vitamin and supplement industry built on sand. Evidence for this can be found by walking into a GNC center—a wonderland of false hope. Rows and rows of megavitamins and dietary supplements promise healthier hearts, smaller prostates, lower cholesterol, improved memory, instant weight loss, lower stress, thicker hair, and better skin. All in a bottle. No one seems to be paying attention to the fact that vitamins and supplements are an unregulated industry. As a consequence, companies aren’t required to support their claims of safety or effectiveness. Worse, the ingredients listed on the label might not reflect what’s in the bottle. And we seem to be perfectly willing to ignore the fact that every week at least one of these supplements is pulled off the shelves after it was found to cause harm. Like the L-tryptophan disaster, an amino acid sold over the counter and found to cause a disease that affected 5,000 people and killed 28. Or the OxyElite Pro disaster, a weight-loss product that caused 50 people to suffer severe liver disease; one person died and three others needed lifesaving liver transplants. Or the Purity First disaster, a Connecticut company’s vitamin preparations that were found to contain two powerful anabolic steroids, causing masculinizing symptoms in dozens of women in the Northeast.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“In 1996, investigators from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle studied 18,000 people who, because they had been exposed to asbestos, were—like those who smoked cigarettes—also at greater risk of lung cancer. Participants were given large doses of vitamin A, beta-carotene, both, or neither. The study ended abruptly when the safety monitors realized that those taking megavitamins had a dramatically higher rate of lung cancer (28 percent greater than those not receiving vitamins) as well as heart disease (17 percent greater).”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“Many residents had written letters, sickened by the aftermath of the spraying. Health officials were unbowed. But Olga Huckins refused to be ignored. She sent a copy of her Boston Herald letter to her friend, Rachel Carson. Four years later, Carson published a book about it. Called Silent Spring, it became an international best seller, alerting the world to the dangers of pesticides, landing Carson on national television programs and in front of congressional hearings, winning praise from people as diverse as President John F. Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, and making Carson one of the most famous and most influential women in the United States. Unfortunately,”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“With the popularity of Black Stork and the support of lawmakers, American citizens were ready to take the next step—to legislate forced sterilization. These procedures had the blessing not only of the medical and scientific communities, but also eventually of the United States Supreme Court. Eugenicists argued that the country would need to sterilize the lower 10 percent of the population and to continue to sterilize the lower 10 percent until the gene pool was pure.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“Beware of scientific biases that fit the culture of the time—beware the zeitgeist.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“Everything has a price; the only question is how big.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“Nurse Ratched,”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“Harmony among peoples comes from the true principles and attitudes of the present,' he wrote, 'not from purging the past.' —Donald Murphy”
― Paul A. Offitt, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“The sad truth is that [Grant] probably did not think too differently than many others who have been 'honored' for some historical role unrelated to the issue of race. I'm not sure that society can or should conduct a wholesale revision of history because the people of the past did not have a late-twentieth century vision of fairness and equality. As director of the California Department of Parks and Recreation, I don't ordinarily wear my ethnicity on my sleeve, so to speak, but in responding to your concerns I feel compelled to note that as an African American I think I have a personal perspective on the pain and suffering, the hurt and disappointment of racism.' —Donald Murphy”
― Paul A. Offitt, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“Despite Carson’s warnings in Silent Spring, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States showed that DDT didn’t cause liver disease, premature births, congenital defects, leukemia, or any of the other diseases she had claimed. Indeed, the only type of cancer that had increased in the United States during the DDT era was lung cancer, which was caused by cigarette smoking. DDT was arguably the safest insect repellent ever invented—far safer than many of the other pesticides that have since taken its place.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“Since 1972, when the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT from the United States, about 50 million people have died from malaria: Most have been children less than five years old. Examples of the impact of Silent Spring abound: In India, between 1952 and 1962, DDT spraying caused a decrease in annual malaria cases from 100 million to 60,000. By the late 1970s, no longer able to use the pesticide, the number of cases increased to 6 million. In Sri Lanka, before the use of DDT, 2.8 million people suffered from malaria. When the spraying stopped in 1964, only 17 people suffered from the disease. Then, between 1968 and 1970, no longer able to use DDT, Sri Lanka suffered a massive malaria epidemic—1.5 million people were infected by the parasite.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“In 1935, Ladislas Joseph Meduna, a Hungarian researcher, invented Metrazol shock therapy. Metrazol caused seizures, and Meduna believed that seizures could treat schizophrenia. He claimed that after treating a patient with catatonic schizophrenia who had been lying in bed for four years, the man got up, dressed himself, put on his hat, and walked out of the hospital. Meduna treated ten more patients, supposedly with the same result.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“More immigrants came into the United States in 1907 alone then entered during the next quarter century. Madison Grant was thrilled. “[This is] one of the greatest steps forward in the history of this country,” he said. “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population from being overrun by the lower races.” The director of Ellis Island, the entry point for most European immigrants, commented that immigrants were now starting to look more like Americans.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“Algal overgrowth has killed streams, lakes, and coastal ecosystems across the Northern Hemisphere. And it’s not just the fish that are dying. The birds that eat the fish are dying, too. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is now the size of New Jersey and is growing. Worse, more than a 150 smaller dead zones have been identified throughout the world. The Baltic Sea north of Germany is one of the most polluted marine ecosystems on the planet; in the 1990s, the Baltic cod industry collapsed. The Thames, Rhine, Meuse, and Elbe Rivers in Europe also contain more than a hundred times the amount of synthetic nitrogen that is considered safe. Similar problems are occurring in the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and China’s two largest rivers: the Huang He and Yangtze.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“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.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“Unfortunately, we seem incapable of learning the most important lesson in toxicology: The dose makes the poison.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“These small quantities of mercury aren’t harmful. Only large quantities are harmful. If small quantities of mercury were harmful, we’d have to move to a different planet.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“Also, if you’re going to say that animal studies predict events in people, then we should stop eating chocolate, which can cause heart arrhythmias and occasionally death in dogs.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“In part because of antibiotics, we live 30 years longer than we did a hundred years ago.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“LINUS PAULING WAS WRONG about megavitamins because he had made two fundamental errors. First, he had assumed that you cannot have too much of a good thing. Vitamins are critical to life. If people don’t get enough vitamins, they suffer various deficiency states, like scurvy (not enough vitamin C) or rickets (not enough vitamin D). The reason that vitamins are so important is that they help convert food into energy. But there’s a catch. To convert food into energy, the body uses a process called oxidation. One outcome of oxidation is the generation of something called free radicals, which can be quite destructive. In search of electrons, free radicals damage cell membranes, DNA, and arteries, including the arteries that supply blood to the heart. As a consequence, free radicals cause cancer, aging, and heart disease. Indeed, free radicals are probably the single greatest reason that we aren’t immortal. To counter the effects of free radicals, the body makes antioxidants. Vitamins—like vitamins A, C, E, and beta-carotene—as well as minerals like selenium and substances like omega-3 fatty acids all have antioxidant activity. For this reason, people who eat diets rich in fruits and vegetables, which are rich in antioxidants, tend to have less cancer, less heart disease, and live longer. Pauling’s logic to this point is clear; if antioxidants in food prevent cancer and heart disease, then eating large quantities of manufactured antioxidants should do the same thing. But Linus Pauling had ignored one important fact: Oxidation is also required to kill new cancer cells and clear clogged arteries. By asking people to ingest large quantities of vitamins and supplements, Pauling had shifted the oxidation-antioxidation balance too far in favor of antioxidation, therefore inadvertently increasing the risk of cancer and heart disease. As it turns out, Mae West aside, you actually can have too much of a good thing. (“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful,” said West, who was talking about sex, not vitamins.) Second, Pauling had assumed that vitamins and supplements ingested in food were the same as those purified or synthesized in a laboratory. This, too, was incorrect. Vitamins are phytochemicals, which means that they are contained in plants (phyto- means “plant” in Greek). The 13 vitamins (A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12, C, D, E, and K) contained in food are surrounded by thousands of other phytochemicals that have long and complicated names like flavonoids, flavonols, flavanones, isoflavones, anthocyanins, anthocyanidins, proanthocyanidins, tannins, isothiocyanates, carotenoids, allyl sulfides, polyphenols, and phenolic acids. The difference between vitamins and these other phytochemicals is that deficiency states like scurvy have been defined for vitamins but not for the others. But make no mistake: These other phytochemicals are important, too. And Pauling’s recommendation to ingest massive quantities of vitamins apart from their natural surroundings was an unnatural act. For example, as described in Catherine Price’s book, Vitamania, half of an apple has the antioxidant activity of 1,500 milligrams of vitamin C, even though it contains only 5.7 milligrams of the vitamin. That’s because the phytochemicals that surround vitamin C in apples enhance its effect”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

“Although many people fear that genetically modified foods might be more dangerous than other foods, careful scientific studies show they have no reason for concern. The American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences have both issued statements supporting the use of GMOs. Even the European Union, which has never been particularly supportive of GMOs, cannot ignore the science. In 2010, the European Commission issued the following statement: “The main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130 research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research involving more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, and in particular GMOs, are not per se more risky than conventional plant breeding technologies.”
― Paul A. Offit, Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong