Book Reviews by Goozner

Readers with access to either Nature or New Scientist magazine may be interested in these reviews that I wrote. One was of a new book by Stan Finkelstein and Peter Temin called Reasonable Rx, where the physician-economist team called for a breakup of the pharmaceutical industry into separate manufacturing and R&D parts. And the other was of David Michaels' Doubt Is Their Product and Thomas McGarity and Wendy Wagner's Bending Science, which skewer corporate campaigns to undermine sound science.

Here's the lead to the latter review:

REAL science depends on the dispassionate search for truth, said sociologist Robert K. Merton a half-century ago. To claim the mantle of scientist, a researcher must be divorced from preconceived bias or monetary gain, and the work should be subjected to the rigorous scrutiny of a community of peers. At the height of the cold war, Merton's coda provided a ringing defence of Enlightenment values.

But by the time Merton articulated those ideals, the tobacco industry had already set in motion a pseudoscientific strategy that threatened to undermine them. Big Tobacco's advance guard created a non-profit institute, hired scientists and commissioned papers with a single purpose in mind: to cast doubt on what would soon become a flood of evidence proving that smoking kills.

It worked. Public campaigns to combat smoking were delayed for decades; regulation was forestalled. . .