“Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives,” by Michael Specter, a staff writer at the magazine, examines our culture’s complex, sometimes perverse, relationship to science. If we feel a cold coming on, we take Echinacea, which has been clinically proven to do nothing; we worry about dying in a plane crash but think nothing of getting into a car, or riding a bike without a helmet. Great numbers of people refuse to vaccinate their children; others oppose genetically modified food. Earlier today, Specter chatted with the Book Bench about irrational fears, understanding risk, and the beauty of common sense.
One of the most interesting things about your book is in the way it shows that denialism isn’t limited to a certain political outlook, cultural orientation, or even educational level. Though you could have discussed denialism about climate change or evolution, you chose to focus on issues like the public’s perception of pharmaceutical companies, organic and genetically engineered food, vaccines and autism, “natural” remedies, and so on. Was part of your aim to encourage your readers to rethink the ways in which they or people they know might be afflicted with irrational thinking?
Yes. And also to try and get people to see connections where they often do not. If you agree with me that vaccinations are the most successful public-health measure in human history, for instance, then maybe you ought to ask yourself why you are so obsessed with vitamins that have been shown, again and again, to do nothing more than darken your urine (at best). Or if you think that sustaining the earth means improving food supply for the billion people who go to bed hungry every night, why are so many people opposed to genetically engineered crops, which have been shown for years to be safe, which have lowered the use of insecticide wherever they are grown, and which hold out so much promise for helping feed people in parts of the world where drought and hunger are common?
You have shown that denialist behaviors often come from an honorable impulse: they “combine decency, a fear of change, and the misguided desire to do good—for our health, for our families, and for the world.” This could refer to many of our attitudes about food and medicine. How do you recommend that people get scientifically sound information, and how do you recommend that we increase our scientific aptitude?
Certainly, a better education system would help. But I know people will see that as utopian. Still, if you look at the way American students score on international science tests the line has been flat for fifteen years—that is a long time in the world of technology. Mainland China, India, Hong Kong, and Singapore are all moving far faster into the future than we are. Schools are only one tool: we can also use common sense; people want good, healthy food that is free of chemicals and hormones and additives. Genetically engineered food does not, by itself, contribute to any of those problems. Consuming too many calories and relying on factory farms do. Why not worry about that more? Nor should we forget that organic food, like all food, is grown with the help of chemicals and the need to kill pests. All food is genetically modified, and has been for more than the ten thousand years since we settled into agricultural communities.
A little logic would also improve our approach to medicine: If you don’t like authority or mistrust pharmaceutical companies (and there are legitimate reasons for both positions), does that really mean you should reject modern medicine and retreat into the magic of herbs that have never been shown to work? (And yes, many herbs have been shown to work. When that happens, of course, they become medicine, not alternatives.) When a study is reported in the news, look at a few salient facts: did it include thousands of people, or dozens? Was it carried out at one place (and paid for by an interested party like a drug company), or was the research conducted in several locations over a reasonable period of time? Questions like that are easy to answer and usually help sift the ludicrous reports of miracle cures from studies that are truly promising.
How does understanding risk play into this?
It is vital. We need to look at the positive and negative aspects of using a drug, or a new technology. Not just one or the other. Too often scientists say that something will cure a disease or solve world hunger, and, of course, nothing ever does. So we react badly to the hype, and that is understandable. However, we have increasingly become a society that has no understanding of the benefits of the things we fear: vaccines can cause adverse reactions. There is no question about that. There is also no question that they prevent the deaths of tens of millions of people every year. The H1N1 flu vaccine has so far been given to nearly seventy million people in the world. In this country there have been some negative reactions, and it is possible that there have even been one or two deaths. (The CDC is investigating.) That is out of tens of millions of vaccinations. Everything we do, whether it is to climb into a car or swallow an aspirin, entails a risk. The flu itself has killed more than ten thousand Americans, and there are still months left in the season. The idea that we should risk dying or become gravely ill from a virus that is tens of thousands of times more likely to cause harm than the vaccine we use to prevent it can only be held by people who give no thought to the risk involved in choosing not to take a vaccine. The same is true of the overblown fears that genetically engineered food will somehow mutate and destroy the world. Those crops can mix with others, and that would be troublesome, though not devastating. We need to make sure it doesn’t happen, and there are many ways to segregate and protect crops. But: millions of people die or go blind each year simply because they do not have vitamin A or proper micronutrients in their diets. Can anyone really doubt that the benefits of using G.E. crops that add those vitamins into rice or cassava, for example, outweigh the risks?
One of the most exciting, promising, and potentially scary topics in your book is that of synthetic biology. What do you wish the average person knew about it, and what it can do for us?
First, I think it is important to remember that scientific progress is the reason I will likely (hopefully) live twice as long as my great-great grandparents. Second, science has made it possible to feed a world that has grown exponentially and that is going to add another three billion residents in the next fifty years. Synthetic biologists take component parts of cells and chemicals—the basic units of life—and mix them together interchangeably, the way you would swap out a hard drive on a computer. That is beginning to bear fruit and already has enabled researchers to create a cheap, plentiful supply of artemisinin, the world’s most important malaria drug. Now, scientists are trying to put together synthetic organisms that might replace the fossil fuels we use to power the industrial world, and to do so without emitting the greenhouse gases that we have burned with such abandon. We are a long way from solving all these problems, and the risks are real. In essence, this means creating entirely new organisms to accomplish some of our most essential goals, and that scares people—and I think it ought to. But if we were able to solve our energy needs this way—and that is still a very open question; we just don’t have enough information to know for sure—I believe the risks would be well worth enduring.
You mention a couple of times in the book the idea of national conversations about science, digital town meetings about major issues led by someone like President Obama. Are you still optimistic about this kind of possibility?
Stupidly, yes. We have national town meetings about the economy. About jobs and banking. Yes, the economy is severely troubled and it affects us all. Is that not also true of climate change and the way we have nearly destroyed the world? If we had a national forum, led by the President, where experts mulled these issues and presented to Americans the options before us—in clear and forceful English—it would begin a vital conversation. And that would become the first important salvo in a war we need to start fighting now. Perhaps it’s a long shot. But progress has rescued us from hunger, disease, and despair in the past. I refuse to believe it won’t be able to do it again now—when we have more exciting scientific tools at our disposal than at any other time in history.
