UNHEVAL LANGUAGE CENTRE

Michael Specter:
The Danger of Science Denial

Let's pretend right here we have a machine. A big machine, a

cool, TED-ish machine, and it's a time machine. And everyone
in this room has to get into it. And you can go backwards,
you can go forwards; you cannot stay where you are. And I
wonder what you'd choose, because I've been asking my
friends this question a lot lately and they all want to go back.
I don't know. They want to go back before there were
automobiles or Twitter or "American Idol." I don't know. I'm
convinced that there's some sort of pull to nostalgia, to
wishful thinking. And I understand that.

I'm not part of that crowd, I have to say. I don't want to go

back, and it's not because I'm adventurous. It's because
possibilities on this planet, they don't go back, they go
forward. So I want to get in the machine, and I want to go
forward. This is the greatest time there's ever been on this
planet by any measure that you wish to choose: health,
wealth, mobility, opportunity, declining rates of disease ...
There's never been a time like this. My great-grandparents
died, all of them, by the time they were 60. My grandparents
pushed that number to 70. My parents are closing in on 80.
So there better be a nine at the beginning of my death
number. But it's not even about people like us, because this is
a bigger deal than that.

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A kid born in New Delhi today can expect to live as long as

the richest man in the world did 100 years ago. Think about
that, it's an incredible fact. And why is it true? Smallpox.
Smallpox killed billions of people on this planet. It reshaped
the demography of the globe in a way that no war ever has.
It's gone. It's vanished. We vanquished it. Puff. In the rich
world, diseases that threatened millions of us just a
generation ago no longer exist, hardly. Diphtheria, rubella,
polio ... does anyone even know what those things are?
Vaccines, modern medicine, our ability to feed billions of
people, those are triumphs of the scientific method. And to
my mind, the scientific method -- trying stuff out, seeing if it
works, changing it when it doesn't -- is one of the great
accomplishments of humanity.

So that's the good news. Unfortunately, that's all the good

news because there are some other problems, and they've
been mentioned many times. And one of them is that despite
all our accomplishments, a billion people go to bed hungry in
this world every day. That number's rising, and it's rising
really rapidly, and it's disgraceful. And not only that, we've
used our imagination to thoroughly trash this globe. Potable
water, arable land, rainforests, oil, gas: they're going away,
and they're going away soon, and unless we innovate our way
out of this mess, we're going away too.

So the question is: Can we do that? And I think we can. I

think it's clear that we can make food that will feed billions of
people without raping the land that they live on. I think we
can power this world with energy that doesn't also destroy it.
I really do believe that, and, no, it ain't wishful thinking. But
here's the thing that keeps me up at night -- one of the
things that keeps me up at night: We've never needed
progress in science more than we need it right now. Never.
And we've also never been in a position to deploy it properly
in the way that we can today. We're on the verge of amazing,
amazing events in many fields, and yet I actually think we'd
have to go back hundreds, 300 years, before the
Enlightenment, to find a time when we battled progress,
when we fought about these things more vigorously, on more
fronts, than we do now.

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People wrap themselves in their beliefs, and they do it so

tightly that you can't set them free. Not even the truth will
set them free. And, listen, everyone's entitled to their
opinion; they're even entitled to their opinion about progress.
But you know what you're not entitled to? You're not entitled
to your own facts. Sorry, you're not. And this took me awhile
to figure out.

About a decade ago, I wrote a story about vaccines for The

New Yorker. A little story. And I was amazed to find
opposition: opposition to what is, after all, the most effective
public health measure in human history. I didn't know what to
do, so I just did what I do: I wrote a story and I moved on.
And soon after that, I wrote a story about genetically
engineered food. Same thing, only bigger. People were going
crazy. So I wrote a story about that too, and I couldn't
understand why people thought this was "Frankenfoods," why
they thought moving molecules around in a specific, rather
than a haphazard way, was trespassing on nature's ground.
But, you know, I do what I do. I wrote the story, I moved on.
I mean, I'm a journalist. We type, we file, we go to dinner.
It's fine.

But these stories bothered me, and I couldn't figure out why,
and eventually I did. And that's because those fanatics that
were driving me crazy weren't actually fanatics at all. They
were thoughtful people, educated people, decent people.
They were exactly like the people in this room. And it just
disturbed me so much. But then I thought, you know, let's be
honest. We're at a point in this world where we don't have
the same relationship to progress that we used to. We talk
about it ambivalently. We talk about it in ironic terms with
little quotes around it: "progress." Okay, there are reasons
for that, and I think we know what those reasons are. We've
lost faith in institutions, in authority, and sometimes in
science itself, and there's no reason we shouldn't have. You
can just say a few names and people will understand.
Chernobyl, Bhopal, the Challenger, Vioxx, weapons of mass
destruction, hanging chads. You know, you can choose your
list. There are questions and problems with the people we
used to believe were always right, so be skeptical. Ask
questions, demand proof, demand evidence. Don't take

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anything for granted. But here's the thing: When you get
proof, you need to accept the proof, and we're not that good
at doing that. And the reason that I can say that is because
we're now in an epidemic of fear like one I've never seen and
hope never to see again.

About 12 years ago, there was a story published, a horrible

story, that linked the epidemic of autism to the measles,
mumps and rubella vaccine shot. Very scary. Tons of studies
were done to see if this was true. Tons of studies should have
been done; it's a serious issue. The data came back. The data
came back from the United States, from England, from
Sweden, from Canada, and it was all the same: no
correlation, no connection, none at all. It doesn't matter. It
doesn't matter because we believe anecdotes, we believe
what we see, what we think we see, what makes us feel real.
We don't believe a bunch of documents from a government
official giving us data, and I do understand that, I think we all
do. But you know what? The result of that has been
disastrous. Disastrous because here's a fact: The United
States is one of the only countries in the world where the
vaccine rate for measles is going down. That is disgraceful,
and we should be ashamed of ourselves. It's horrible. What
kind of a thing happened that we could do that?

Now, I understand it. I do understand it. Because, did anyone

have measles here? Has one person in this audience ever
seen someone die of measles? Doesn't happen very much.
Doesn't happen in this country at all, but it happened 160,000
times in the world last year. That's a lot of death of measles
-- 20 an hour. But since it didn't happen here, we can put it
out of our minds, and people like Jenny McCarthy can go
around preaching messages of fear and illiteracy from
platforms like "Oprah" and "Larry King Live." And they can do
it because they don't link causation and correlation. They
don't understand that these things seem the same, but
they're almost never the same. And it's something we need to
learn, and we need to learn it really soon.

This guy was a hero, Jonas Salk. He took one of the worst
scourges of mankind away from us. No fear, no agony. Polio
-- puff, gone. That guy in the middle, not so much. His name
is Paul Offit. He just developed a rotavirus vaccine with a
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bunch of other people. It'll save the lives of 400 to 500,000

kids in the developing world every year. Pretty good, right?
Well, it's good, except that Paul goes around talking about
vaccines and says how valuable they are and that people
ought to just stop the whining. And he actually says it that
way. So, Paul's a terrorist. When Paul speaks in a public
hearing, he can't testify without armed guards. He gets called
at home because people like to tell him that they remember
where his kids go to school. And why? Because Paul made a
vaccine.

I don't need to say this, but vaccines are essential. You take
them away, disease comes back, horrible diseases. And that's
happening. We have measles in this country now. And it's
getting worse, and pretty soon kids are going to die of it
again because it's just a numbers game. And they're not just
going to die of measles. What about polio? Let's have that.
Why not? A college classmate of mine wrote me a couple
weeks ago and said she thought I was a little strident. No
one's ever said that before. She wasn't going to vaccinate her
kid against polio, no way. Fine. Why? Because we don't have
polio. And you know what? We didn't have polio in this
country yesterday. Today, I don't know, maybe a guy got on
a plane in Lagos this morning, and he's flying to LAX, right
now he's over Ohio. And he's going to land in a couple of
hours, he's going to rent a car, and he's going to come to
Long Beach, and he's going to attend one of these fabulous
TED dinners tonight. And he doesn't know that he's infected
with a paralytic disease, and we don't either because that's
the way the world works. That's the planet we live on. Don't
pretend it isn't.

Now, we love to wrap ourselves in lies. We love to do it.

Everyone take their vitamins this morning? Echinacea, a little
antioxidant to get you going. I know you did because half of
Americans do every day. They take the stuff, and they take
alternative medicines, and it doesn't matter how often we find
out that they're useless. The data says it all the time. They
darken your urine. They almost never do more than that. It's
okay, you want to pay 28 billion dollars for dark urine? I'm
totally with you. Dark urine. Dark. Why do we do that? Why
do we do that? Well, I think I understand, we hate Big

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Pharma. We hate Big Government. We don't trust the Man.

And we shouldn't: Our health care system sucks. It's cruel to
millions of people. It's absolutely astonishingly cold and soul-
bending to those of us who can even afford it. So we run
away from it, and where do we run? We leap into the arms of
Big Placebo. That's fantastic. I love Big Placebo.

But, you know, it's really a serious thing because this stuff is
crap, and we spend billions of dollars on it. And I have all
sorts of little props here. None of it ... ginkgo, fraud;
echinacea, fraud; acai -- I don't even know what that is but
we're spending billions of dollars on it -- it's fraud. And you
know what? When I say this stuff, people scream at me, and
they say, "What do you care? Let people do what they want
to do. It makes them feel good." And you know what? You're
wrong. Because I don't care if it's the secretary of HHS who's
saying, "Hmm, I'm not going to take the evidence of my
experts on mammograms," or some cancer quack who wants
to treat his patient with coffee enemas. When you start down
the road where belief and magic replace evidence and
science, you end up in a place you don't want to be. You end
up in Thabo Mbeki South Africa. He killed 400,000 of his
people by insisting that beetroot, garlic and lemon oil were
much more effective than the antiretroviral drugs we know
can slow the course of AIDS. Hundreds of thousands of
needless deaths in a country that has been plagued worse
than any other by this disease. Please, don't tell me there are
no consequences to these things. There are. There always
are.

Now, the most mindless epidemic we're in the middle of right

now is this absurd battle between proponents of genetically
engineered food and the organic elite. It's an idiotic debate. It
has to stop. It's a debate about words, about metaphors. It's
ideology, it's not science. Every single thing we eat, every
grain of rice, every sprig of parsley, every Brussels sprout has
been modified by man. You know, there weren't tangerines in
the garden of Eden. There wasn't any cantaloupe. (Laughter)
There weren't Christmas trees. We made it all. We made it
over the last 11,000 years. And some of it worked, and some
of it didn't. We got rid of the stuff that didn't. Now we can do
it in a more precise way -- and there are risks, absolutely --

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but we can put something like vitamin A into rice, and that
stuff can help millions of people, millions of people, prolong
their lives. You don't want to do that? I have to say, I don't
understand it.

We object to genetically engineered food. Why do we do that?

Well, the things I constantly hear are: Too many chemicals,
pesticides, hormones, monoculture, we don't want giant fields
of the same thing, that's wrong. We don't companies
patenting life. We don't want companies owning seeds. And
you know what my response to all of that is? Yes, you're
right. Let's fix it. It's true, we've got a huge food problem, but
this isn't science. This has nothing to do with science. It's law,
it's morality, it's patent stuff. You know science isn't a
company. It's not a country. It's not even an idea; it's a
process. It's a process, and sometimes it works and
sometimes it doesn't, but the idea that we should not allow
science to do its job because we're afraid, is really very
deadening, and it's preventing millions of people from
prospering.

You know, in the next 50 years we're going to have to grow

70 percent more food than we do right now, 70 percent. This
investment in Africa over the last 30 years. Disgraceful.
Disgraceful. They need it, and we're not giving it to them.
And why? Genetically engineered food. We don't want to
encourage people to eat that rotten stuff, like cassava for
instance. Cassava's something that half a billion people eat.
It's kind of like a potato. It's just a bunch of calories. It sucks.
It doesn't have nutrients, it doesn't have protein, and
scientists are engineering all of that into it right now. And
then people would be able to eat it and they'd be able to not
go blind. They wouldn't starve, and you know what? That
would be nice. It wouldn't be Chez Panisse, but it would be
nice.

And all I can say about this is: Why are we fighting it? I
mean, let's ask ourselves: Why are we fighting it? Because
we don't want to move genes around? This is about moving
genes around. It's not about chemicals. It's not about our
ridiculous passion for hormones, our insistence on having
bigger food, better food, singular food. This isn't about Rice
Krispies, this is about keeping people alive, and it's about
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time we started to understand what that meant. Because, you

know something? If we don't, if we continue to act the way
we're acting, we're guilty of something that I don't think we
want to be guilty of: high-tech colonialism. There's no other
way to describe what's going on here. It's selfish, it's ugly, it's
beneath us, and we really have to stop it.

So after this amazingly fun conversation, you might want to

say, "So, you still want to get in this ridiculous time machine
and go forward?" Absolutely. Absolutely, I do. It's stuck in the
present right now, but we have an amazing opportunity. We
can set that time machine on anything we want. We can
move it where we want to move it, and we're going to move it
where we want to move it. We have to have these
conversations and we have to think, but when we get in the
time machine and we go ahead, we're going to be happy we
do. I know that we can, and as far as I'm concerned, that's
something the world needs right now.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

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