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.

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
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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 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.

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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 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

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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 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.

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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 -- 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

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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 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
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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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