Complicating the narrative

Recent books by David Michaels, an epidemiologist and former assistant secretary of labor at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University, address the role of science within the policy realms of public health, environmental protection, and worker safety. Both authors explore the basis for scientific authority and describe how special interests misuse scientific findings, processes, and methods to undermine policy implementation and regulatory oversight. In The Triumph of Doubt, Michaels performs a public service by shining a light on the “product defense industry”: a well-established enterprise with a shopworn playbook and standardized modes of operation for protecting from regulation and litigation clients whose products or activities pose public health concerns. He demonstrates that this industry is the result not of the isolated actions of a few bad apples, but an entrenched cadre of what he calls “mercenary scientists.” It’s useful to be reminded that tobacco companies, for instance, need more than access to tobacco, manufacturing facilities, labor, and far-flung distribution and retail systems; they also need ready-at-hand capability to forge and perpetuate doubt about the negative health implications of cigarettes. This book is clearly important, and the tactics and implied worldview of the product defense industry are galling and deplorable. As the consumer advocate Ralph Nader writes in one of the book’s dust jacket blurbs, the book should “grip you toward detection and defiance.” Although Michaels’s depiction of various obfuscation campaigns is engaging, his book sometimes substitutes assertion Complicating the Narrative