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Summary
Summary
In this provocative and headline-making book, Michael Specter confronts the widespread fear of science and its terrible toll on individuals and the planet.
In Denialism, New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter reveals that Americans have come to mistrust institutions and especially the institution of science more today than ever before. For centuries, the general view had been that science is neither good nor bad--that it merely supplies information and that new information is always beneficial. Now, science is viewed as a political constituency that isn't always in our best interest. We live in a world where the leaders of African nations prefer to let their citizens starve to death rather than import genetically modified grains. Childhood vaccines have proven to be the most effective public health measure in history, yet people march on Washington to protest their use. In the United States a growing series of studies show that dietary supplements and "natural" cures have almost no value, and often cause harm. We still spend billions of dollars on them. In hundreds of the best universities in the world, laboratories are anonymous, unmarked, and surrounded by platoons of security guards--such is the opposition to any research that includes experiments with animals. And pharmaceutical companies that just forty years ago were perhaps the most visible symbol of our remarkable advance against disease have increasingly been seen as callous corporations propelled solely by avarice and greed.
As Michael Specter sees it, this amounts to a war against progress . The issues may be complex but the choices are not: Are we going to continue to embrace new technologies, along with acknowledging their limitations and threats, or are we ready to slink back into an era of magical thinking? In Denialism , Specter makes an argument for a new Enlightenment, the revival of an approach to the physical world that was stunningly effective for hundreds of years: What can be understood and reliably repeated by experiment is what nature regarded as true. Now, at the time of mankind's greatest scientific advances--and our greatest need for them--that deal must be renewed.
Author Notes
Michael Specter writes about science, technology and global public health for the New Yorker , where he has been a staff writer since 1998. He has twice received the Global Health Council's Excellence in Media Award, as well as the Science Journalism Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Although denialists, according to Specter, come from both ends of the political spectrum, they have one important trait in common: their willingness to "replace the rigorous and open-minded skepticism of science with the inflexible certainty of ideological commitment." Specter analyzes the consequences of this inflexibility and draws some startling and uncomfortable conclusions for the health of both individuals and society. For example, though every reputable scientific study demonstrates the safety of major childhood vaccines, opponents of childhood immunization are winning the publicity war; childhood immunizations are tumbling and preventable diseases are increasing, often leading to unnecessary deaths. Specter, a New Yorker science and public health writer, does an equally credible job of demolishing the health claims made by those promoting organic produce and all forms of "alternative" medicine. Specter is both provocative and thoughtful in his defense of science and rationality-though he certainly does not believe that scientists are infallible. His writing is engaging and his sources are credible, making this a significant addition to public discourse on the importance of discriminating between credible science and snake oil. (Nov. 2) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Written by a New Yorker staff journalist who specializes in public health, this work reports on the influence of activists, often celebrities, who reject mainstream medical science. Collecting their attitudes under the rubric of denialism, Specter relentlessly reproves their arguments, identifies the fears behind denialism, and refracts as refutation the views of genuine scientists who research the specific health topic at hand. Most issues are of recent or current vintage, such as opposition to childhood vaccinations, which cause autism, according to activists such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To denialists, the late scandal about the anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx confirmed their conspiracy theories about Big Pharma because, they concluded, if one company concealed damaging information about its product, every drug company does. Finding the denialist mentality suspiciousness of connections between science and commerce, a yearning for the simple and natural over the complicated and artificial behind the popularity of organic foods and vitamins, Specter critiques claims of health benefits emanating from those arenas. Dubious about alternative medicine, Specter advocates for clinical medicine's superiority.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE optimistic view of science is that the theories advanced with its methods will have self-evident appeal to an educated public. Why, then, do people so often behave unscientifically? A sitting congressman claims he's seen a U.F.O.; a former Playboy model insists, against overwhelming evidence, that childhood vaccines cause autism; Las Vegas vacationers expect to beat the casinos; former British Prime Minister Tony Blair treats his children with homeopathic remedies. Science utopians can be touching in their naïveté, much like high school chemistry whizzes who try to figure out why the popular kids never pay them any attention. But they fail to appreciate a salient point: scientists may get how the atoms of the universe combine, but they're often dweebs in the real world. In any event, there are two ways to deal with scientific illiteracy: take a long, hard look at the forces that repel so many from science, or throw up your hands and write people off as fools. Michael Specter, a science and public health writer for The New Yorker, shows little interest in the first approach in his pugnacious new book, "Denialism," which carries the ominous subtitle "How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives." He devotes chapters to anti-vaccine zealots, purveyors of organic foods, promoters of alternative medicines and opponents of race-based medicine, accusing each group of turning "away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie." Specter is not the first to take on doubters of science. More than a decade ago, Michael Shermer - who believed in alien abduction and megavitamin therapy before becoming a confirmed skeptic - adopted a more sympathetic tack in "Why People Believe Weird Things." Shermer wisely realized that the public's view of science is refracted by human psychology. For example, we are wired to see patterns even when none may exist. And from science, as from any explanatory framework, we tend to seek instant gratification, the reassuring company of others, and simplicity. But Specter isn't much interested in the roots of denialism, much less in engaging productively with it While his book brims with passion and many interesting facts, he repeatedly pulls rabble-rousing tricks - this in a book that accuses others of forgoing rational debate - and his annoyance is rarely focused. The opening chapter, "Vioxx and the Fear of Science," is ostensibly about Merck's blockbuster pain drug, which was linked to heart attacks and eventually pulled from shelves. But Specter never clearly presents the clinical data itself. Instead, he spins a tale of Big Pharma greed indirectly feeding public skepticism of science, and in an effort to push as many buttons as possible, somehow pulls in the writings of Goethe, forced sterilization of the "feebleminded," the Unabomber, the Bhopal disaster, the Vietnam War, Chernobyl and Josef Mengele. Paradoxically, Specter ends the chapter by castigating the public for not being more forgiving about Vioxx, whose risks he concludes were relatively small, about the same as driving a car. (He quotes the initial whistle-blower as saying he now "would be perfectly happy if it was back on the market.") His ire has no clear target, and he doesn't explain just what party - drug companies? patients? regulators? - engaged in "denialism." Specter unwittingly provides several examples of how unscientific beliefs gestate. He is enthralled by the use of the personal genome map to detect racial differences in health and accuses skeptics of denialism. On the basis of a single anecdote (from the founder of a personal genomics company) about a man who underwent expensive, repeated testing that caught prostate cancer - in truth, by dumb luck - he seems to endorse an unproven and probably harmful cancer screening practice. Later, citing a study showing that the widely used asthma drug albuterol is 7 percent less effective in Puerto Ricans than in Mexicans, he overgeneralizes the results and dismisses the drug as "effective on whites but not on many Hispanics" because of genetic differences. Specter promotes the heavily marketed cardiac drug BiDil as working "far better for blacks than for whites," but neglects the persistent controversy around how well the drug really performs among blacks in clinical practice. SPECTER used to be a denialist himself. Back in 2001, he wrote a balanced, even sympathetic profile of a doctor named Nicholas Gonzalez, who scored a $1.4 million federal grant to study, among other things, the benefits of coffee enemas in treating cancer. In 2004, inspired by Britney Spears's use of a diet pill called Zantrex-3, he wrote another nuanced article exploring the powerful political and corporate forces behind the sales of alternative medicines, in which he seemed less sanguine about their use. Now, in a chapter called "The Era of Echinacea," Specter completes his conversion. He regrets supporting Gonzalez's project ("Studies like that just made the ridiculous seem worth investigating,'' he writes), linking it to the same kind of magical thinking behind South African President Thabo Mbeki's denial that H.I.V. causes AIDS. Here, Specter could have explored how even a prestigious science writer like himself was seduced by the highly unlikely possibility that coffee enemas might cure pancreatic cancer. (After all, the flip side of denialism is faith, which isn't always bad.) But rather than attempting to understand his former fellow denialists, he pushes them out of reasoned conversation, declaring, "Denialism is a virus, and viruses are contagious." It's hard to identify the intended audience for this book, or how it might make a difference. Specter gets quite exercised by the anti-vaccine lunatic fringe, but doesn't explore ways of winning over the undecided or mildly suspicious, like the many people concerned about the swine flu vaccine. Similarly, he argues that opposition to genetically modified food in the affluent West is preventing the spread of technology needed to feed the developing world. There may be some truth to this claim; however, statements like "The Western cult of organic food is nothing more than a glorious fetish of the rich" are unlikely to convince devoted Whole Foods shoppers to rethink their position. In his haste to sort people into two bins - either scientifically enlightened or in denial - Specter overlooks an important trend: for better or worse, people are more skeptical of authority than they used to be and want to think for themselves, which includes grappling with the minutiae of science. Not so long ago, for example, patients rarely questioned doctors before undergoing surgery or taking their pills (for example, estrogen replacement therapy to prevent heart attacks), a blind obethence to authority that arguably cost many more lives than, say, vaccine refusal does now. What we are seeing is the democratization of science, not the rise of denialism. Over time the right will be separated from the wrong, perhaps more rapidly than in the past. In the meantime, Specter might draw comfort from the fact that children no longer suffer widely from chicken pox and childhood bacterial infections because of vaccines introduced in the 1990s; that harmful practices like hormone replacement therapy were stopped; and that next year researchers in Africa will begin testing genetically modified crops expected to prevent childhood deaths caused by malnutrition. The list goes on. Specter has written a frustrated book about "denialism" but could just as well have described the hopeful signs of a new era. Darshak Sanghavi, the chief of pediatric cardiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, is Slate's health care columnist and the author of "A Map of the Child: A Pediatrician's Tour of the Body."
Kirkus Review
From New Yorker staffer Specter, a sarcasm-drenched denunciation of all who will not kneel at the altar of science. "Denialists," as Specter calls such people, "shun nuance and fear complexity, so instead of asking how science might help resolve our problems, they reject novel strategies even when those strategies are supported by impressive data and scientific consensus." Never mind that consensus once supported the idea of an Earth-centric universe and of epilepsy as a sign of demonic possession, and never mind Specter's own lack of nuance in lumping climate-change deniers, GM-food opponents, anti-vaccination activists and other such types into a single category. Are those who worry about the prospect of eating genetically altered food really on a par with Holocaust deniers? Specter seems glad to equate them, and to accuse any such worriers of being glad to condemn African villagers to lives of famine and misery. Are organic foodies evil? Apparently so ("the Western cult of organic food is nothing more than a glorious fetish of the rich")never mind the fact that nonorganic farming is an innovation scarcely a century old and that eating fossil fuel is not very good for anyone. Specter rolls a few fuzzy-math dice along the wayat one point he gives the appearance that the 2,000-odd Americans who died of aspirin poisoning in 2008 were merely victims of bad luckand he advances a few straw-man lines of argument that would make a college-composition student blush. Readers will need to be comfortable with the idea that Big Pharma loves them, corporate culture cares, industrial agribusinesses are in it for the public good and bacteriologists stand next to the Godhead. Denialism, it would seem, includes denying that science has ever caused harm. Specter's spirited approach to his subject is admirable, but his brush is far too broad and his disdain far too deep. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Written in a journalistic style similar to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, this is a self-proclaimed polemic against all who would deny the promise and progress of science, people whom the author calls "denialists." Using the word to refer to a range of people and views, Specter, a New Yorker staff writer who focuses on science, technology, and public health, argues they "replace the rigorous and open-minded skepticism of science with the inflexible certainty of ideological commitment." Much of what Specter writes is good and true. People are not good judges of risk. Vaccinations are vital to people's health. And politics and ideology should not replace science. Yet Specter's extreme scientific exceptionalism, his oversimplification of complex issues and historical episodes, and his near-comical characterization of the denialist make this a hard pill to swallow. Verdict Many, especially the skeptical and the scientifically inclined, will find arguments that trade on generalities, ignore subtleties, and caricature the opposition suspect. Thus, Specter's book is unlikely to ring true to the believer in science or to convert the unbeliever. Not recommended.-Jonathan Bodnar, Georgia Inst. of Technology Lib. & Information Ctr., Atlanta (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| 1 Vioxx and the Fear of Science | p. 23 |
| 2 Vaccines and the Great Denial | p. 57 |
| 3 The Organic Fetish | p. 103 |
| 4 The Era of Echinacea | p. 147 |
| 5 Race and the Language of Life | p. 187 |
| 6 Surfing the Exponential | p. 225 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 265 |
| Notes | p. 269 |
| Bibliography | p. 275 |
| Index | p. 281 |
