How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health
The manufacture of uncertainty
The American Prospect
by Chris Mooney
03/28/08
The sabotage of science is now a routine part of American politics. The same corporate strategy of bombarding the courts and regulatory agencies with a barrage of dubious scientific information has been tried on innumerable occasions — and it has nearly always worked, at least for a time. Tobacco. Asbestos. Lead. Vinyl chloride. Chromium. Formaldehyde. Arsenic. Atrazine. Benzene. Beryllium. Mercury. Vioxx. And on and on. … Tobacco companies perfected the ruse, which was later copycatted by other polluting or health-endangering industries. One tobacco executive was even dumb enough to write it down in 1969. ‘Doubt is our product,’ reads the infamous memo, ’since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.’ In his important new book, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, David Michaels calls the strategy ‘manufacturing uncertainty’...
http://tinyurl.com/2w5evb
Tobacco funded many researchers
Boston Globe
03/31/08
The nation’s largest cigarette maker has paid for scientific research at four Massachusetts universities since 2000, a practice that critics of the tobacco industry liken to the Mafia underwriting crime fighting. ‘Taking money from the tobacco industry to conduct scientific research is like the DA taking money from the Mafia to conduct investigations of crime,’ said Gregory Connolly, a Harvard School of Public Health professor and former director of the Massachusetts Tobacco Control Program. Philip Morris USA, which makes Marlboro and other top-selling cigarette lines, gave grants to scientists at Boston University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Massachusetts, company spokesman David M. Sylvia said Friday. The research supported by the company touched on conditions such as heart disease and cancer that are linked to smoking. The grants given by the Philip Morris External Research Program were not used to develop new tobacco products or refine existing brands, but they may have helped the company rehabilitate its public image...
http://tinyurl.com/3946ds
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
--------
Doubt is Their Product
Industry's Assault on Science Threatens your Health
http://www.defendingscience.org/Doubt_is_Their_Product.cfm
From Mast Sanity/Mast Network
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Philip+Morris
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=tobacco
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=junk+science
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Chris+Mooney
The American Prospect
by Chris Mooney
03/28/08
The sabotage of science is now a routine part of American politics. The same corporate strategy of bombarding the courts and regulatory agencies with a barrage of dubious scientific information has been tried on innumerable occasions — and it has nearly always worked, at least for a time. Tobacco. Asbestos. Lead. Vinyl chloride. Chromium. Formaldehyde. Arsenic. Atrazine. Benzene. Beryllium. Mercury. Vioxx. And on and on. … Tobacco companies perfected the ruse, which was later copycatted by other polluting or health-endangering industries. One tobacco executive was even dumb enough to write it down in 1969. ‘Doubt is our product,’ reads the infamous memo, ’since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.’ In his important new book, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, David Michaels calls the strategy ‘manufacturing uncertainty’...
http://tinyurl.com/2w5evb
Tobacco funded many researchers
Boston Globe
03/31/08
The nation’s largest cigarette maker has paid for scientific research at four Massachusetts universities since 2000, a practice that critics of the tobacco industry liken to the Mafia underwriting crime fighting. ‘Taking money from the tobacco industry to conduct scientific research is like the DA taking money from the Mafia to conduct investigations of crime,’ said Gregory Connolly, a Harvard School of Public Health professor and former director of the Massachusetts Tobacco Control Program. Philip Morris USA, which makes Marlboro and other top-selling cigarette lines, gave grants to scientists at Boston University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Massachusetts, company spokesman David M. Sylvia said Friday. The research supported by the company touched on conditions such as heart disease and cancer that are linked to smoking. The grants given by the Philip Morris External Research Program were not used to develop new tobacco products or refine existing brands, but they may have helped the company rehabilitate its public image...
http://tinyurl.com/3946ds
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
--------
Doubt is Their Product
Industry's Assault on Science Threatens your Health
http://www.defendingscience.org/Doubt_is_Their_Product.cfm
From Mast Sanity/Mast Network
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Philip+Morris
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=tobacco
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=junk+science
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Chris+Mooney
rudkla - 31. Mär, 11:23
