Edith's Guide to Junk Science

'The Apolcalyptics,' as relevant as ever

The paradigm, she wrote, had acquired “a pathological life of its own.” It allowed only “for hysteria, for ‘suspicion,’ for scientific ‘fiction’ and ‘mythology,’ for demagogy — and for the use of political force to impose moral and political substitutes for science on industry, on the nation — and most crucial of all on the academic opposition.”

Another takedown of “public health” and its thuggish COVID-19 groupthink? Nope. The words were written four decades ago.

In 1984, Simon and Shuster published The Apocalyptics: Cancer and the Big Lie. Edith Efron, possessing impeccable establishmentarian credentials (Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, The New York Times Magazine, TIME, Mike Wallace), had grown skeptical of the de rigueur public-health scare of the 1970s. And in 590 pages, she systematically demolished fearmongering about — and the federal government’s regulatory blundering into — The Big C.

A former employer frequently disseminated the kind of hype that induced Efron’s ire. In October 1975, TIME screeched that during the last half-century, “environmental diseases have spread beyond those in a few specialized trades,” and cancer was the top concern. The “industrialized and highly air-polluted Northeast has a particularly high incidence of lung cancer, as do areas where copper and lead smelters are located,” while the “highest rates of bladder and liver cancers are found in counties with plants producing rubber and chemicals, perfumes and cosmetics, soaps and printing ink.” Drinking water was “suspect.” So was anything made of PVC.

Ooo. Scary. And wrong. David Murray and Joel Schwartz explained, two decades later:

More Americans were dying of cancer because more of them were elderly; more of them were dying of cancer because fewer were dying of other diseases (and everyone eventually has to die of something); but it was not the case that more were dying of cancer because cancer had suddenly become more dangerous.

TIME dispensed with such clear-headedness. It concluded “The Disease of the Century” with a quote from a doctor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine: “What is an acceptable risk for cancer? One out of a hundred? More? Less? With cancer, any risk is too high.”

Sound familiar? Efron, like her Rona-dissenting heirs, struggled to verify what she considered wildly irresponsible claims regarding the ubiquity and severity of the threat. Were Americans really trapped in an “infinitely expanding universe of danger,” and “risking their lives every time they breathed, ate, drank, or touched”? Furthermore, if cancer from “pollution” required a massive policy response, what would the unintended consequences be?

The Apocalyptics attempted to answer both questions. In voluminous and wondrously convincing style, it did.

Perhaps Efron’s strongest finding was the hollowness of claims about “carcinogens” documented in laboratories. As Elizabeth Miller, a pioneering oncologist, put it: “The single fact that at very high doses a chemical causes some cancers in experimental animals … may not be an adequate reason for removing it from uses beneficial to the public.” No kidding. An army of science professionals doubted, or were openly hostile to, the notion “that animal cancer predicted cancer in man.”

Equally disturbing, the carcinogen panic of the 1970s tossed the fundamental principle of toxicology itself — “the dose makes the poison” — aside. In its place, Efron wrote, a “new toxicology,” founded on a “moral-political approach,” was erected. It invited “into the ranks” a “group of unusual new specialists who knew nothing whatever about biology, toxicology, or carcinogenicity: sociologists, lawyers, and economists.”

In 1976, a Democratic Congress passed, and a Republican president signed, the Toxic Substances Control Act. The Swamp adopted “a ‘cancer prevention program’ based on animal tests; substances declared to be carcinogens in animal tests were being regulated and banned.” But “few realized that this blaze of seeming progress had only been made possible by a law which sheltered ‘regulatory’ scientists from having to prove any of their claims.” The TSCA, in somewhat-altered form, remains on the books.

The Apocalyptics is long forgotten, and Efron’s name rarely appears in lists of libertarian luminaries. That’s a shame. Her bravura treatise set the standard for the evisceration of junk science. It should inspire today’s budding debunkers of hokum.

And there’s so much work for the reality-centered community to do. “Forever chemicals,” glyphosate, “ultra-processed foods,” GMOs — grant-grabbing “scientists,” crazed activists, vote-chasing pols, and lazy “reporters” still peddle all manner of panics, to easily frightened Wine Moms and Soy Boy Dads. And now, the weather is coming to get you.

Can someone get going on an AI Edith Efron, to see what she’d have to say about the “climate crisis”?