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David Michaels. Doubt is their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens your Health. Oxford, USA: Oxford University Press, zoo8. $27.95, hardback. ISBN13: 9780195300673
Journal of Public Health Policy (zoo8) 29, 474-476.
doi:10.1057/jphp.zoo8.31
"Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy". Thus spoke the tobacco industry executive in 1969. Five years after the US Surgeon General's report on smoking had concluded that cigarettes cause lung cancer.
That candid but then confidential strategic response of the tobacco industry to the hazards of their product provides David Michaels, former Assistant Secretary for Environment, Safety, and Health in the US Department of Energy, with the title of his book. Selecting from those hazardous issues that he has played a part in helping to control, Michaels unveils the now well-worn response of many industries to the early evidence about hazards of their products: manufacture scientific doubt and ride out the ensuing controversy for as long as possible. After all, as he points out, it is more convenient for industry to debate the science than the harm prevention policies that could flow from it.
Ironically, our expanding scientific knowledge is providing greater opportunities for both genuine and "manufactured" doubt. As our awareness of complexity and multi-causality in...