CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING QUOTATION, FROM A SPEECH introducing the winner of a Nobel Prize, with certain identifying words removed:
[REDACTED], despite certain limitations . . . must be considered one of the most important discoveries ever made in [REDACTED], because through its use a great number of suffering people and total invalids have recovered and have been . . . rehabilitated.1
A Nobel Prize and fawning description of a therapy so revolutionary that it gets a “most important ever” designation within its field—what amazing treatment could this be? The advent of chemotherapy? The polio vaccine? Penicillin?
No; as a matter of fact, the groundbreaking therapy in question was: frontal lobotomy. The two bits redacted from the quote are in place of, respectively, “frontal leucotomy,” which is another term for lobotomy, and “psychiatric therapy.” This is not a joke: a Portuguese surgeon named Egas Moniz won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the idea of hammering into your brain to cut some of its connections.
The lesson here is that science and medicine are never finished. Just because something appears true in 1949 does not mean it will appear true in 1950, let alone in 1985 or 2000 or 2015. Politicians, though, sometimes ignore this basic tenet: this is the BLIND EYE TO FOLLOW-UP, when an elected official repeats information from what may be outdated, improved-on, or outright debunked scientific inquiry.
Of course, it wasn’t long after Moniz’s prize that the use of lobotomy began to decline dramatically. This drop-off was due in part to the development of antipsychotic medications and other treatments that could help some of the people previously deemed lobotomy-worthy, and in part to a growing and fierce opposition to the use of “psychosurgery” as a method of institutional control. This may be a particularly strange and stark change in medical practice, but this sort of transformation takes place all the time. Scientists and doctors can’t simply stop paying attention to the march of progress; the science moves forward, and so do we.
For politicians, though, sometimes the purpose of mentioning a certain scientific tidbit is to advance a political agenda. Therefore, the previous study or finding, or one from five or ten years ago, might be a more convincing data point than whatever has cropped up since then. For example, here’s what President Obama had to say as he touted the brand-new “Precision Medicine Initiative,” specifically speaking of the incredible benefits gained from the Human Genome Project:
One study found that every dollar we spent to map the human genome has already returned $140 to our economy.2
A $140-to-$1 return on investment! That is a truly remarkable boon to humanity and to science. And the president was correct: there was indeed a study that arrived at that number. But there was another study afterward, by the very same researchers, that lowered that enormous ROI down to $65 for every dollar spent on the HGP. Obama chose to mention the higher number, ignoring the second study.
First of all, let’s be clear: literally no honest scientist on the planet would argue that the Human Genome Project, which took a decade or so to map out all three billion DNA base pairs that make up our genetic code, was not an amazing and crucially important achievement. Since its completion, scientists have used its findings to learn staggering amounts about our genes, our bodies, the diseases that harm and kill us, therapies to stave off those diseases, and much more. It was truly one of science’s greatest accomplishments—and $65 to $1 is still an amazing ROI!
The president’s BLIND EYE TO FOLLOW-UP was not, in the grand scheme of things, a particularly damaging error. His basic point, that spending money to learn about underlying biology, disease prevention, and so on brings great returns in the long run, is nearly indisputable. The question is, why not use the best, most recent number available? Using the older result only opens you up to criticism, to claims that the money you’re asking for isn’t worth what you say it is.
The study Obama referenced was conducted by two researchers—Simon Tripp and Martin Grueber—at the Battelle Memorial Institute, the world’s largest research-and-development nonprofit.3 They undertook “a quantitative measurement of the direct and indirect economic impacts in the United States derived from actual expenditures of the HGP project and follow-on federal expenditures in major genomic science programs,” as well as estimates of the impact of the “genomics and genomics-enabled industry.”4
First, what did the Human Genome Project cost? The federal government invested a total of $3.8 billion (or $5.6 billion, using inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars) in the endeavor, spread out over the thirteen years from 1990 to 2003, to map out every gene in human DNA.
Now the benefits: According to the Battelle analysis, the HGP directly and indirectly resulted in an economic output of $796 billion, along with 3.8 million “job-years” of employment (a job-year is one person employed full-time for one year). That dollar amount comes from a variety of specific sources. Here’s how the researchers described them:
Scientists are using the reference genome, the knowledge of genome structure, and the data resulting from the HGP as the foundation for fundamental advancements in medicine and science with the goals of preventing, diagnosing, and treating human disease. Also, while foundational to the understanding of human biological systems, the knowledge and advancements embodied in the human genome sequencing, and the sequencing of model organisms, are useful beyond human biomedical sciences.
The resulting “genomic revolution” is influencing renewable energy development, industrial biotechnology, agricultural biosciences, veterinary sciences, environmental science, forensic science and homeland security, and advanced studies in zoology, ecology, anthropology and other disciplines.
Simple math based on the expenditures and impacts yields a return on investment of just over $140 for every dollar spent—just as the president said. So why was he wrong?
The president was wrong in choosing the statistic he used because the study authors themselves essentially admitted they were wrong. Well, they never came out and said so, but they addressed criticisms5 by updating the analysis and changing some of their methods—a tacit admission, one could argue, that the first attempt was at least somewhat misleading.
There were several reasons. For example, some of the dollar amounts that were included as benefits are more accurately described as costs; the salaries of the scientists engaged in the project, for example, were initially considered as benefits. Most important, the initial report considered the costs only through 2003, while counting the benefits all the way through 2010. There were, of course, continued expenses associated with genome sequencing and related fields.
When the numbers were run again, both with some changes to methodology and with two more years of accruing economic impacts, the ROI dropped substantially. In the 2013 version of the Battelle analysis, the researchers included impacts and benefits through the same year and concluded: “Every $ of federal HGP and related investment has helped contribute to the generation of an additional $65 in the U.S. economy.”6 That’s less than half the impact that President Obama mentioned in his speech, which he gave well after that second report had been released. (He had used the statistic before, notably in one speech announcing the BRAIN Initiative, focused on—obviously—brain research.7 But that speech happened a couple months before the follow-up study came out. He was correct that time, but not two years later. If his staff could find the original study the first time, there is no reason they couldn’t find the updated version as well.)
The change to methodology in the two Battelle reports is not any sort of scandal or unseemly incident. Assessing the economic impact of such a broad scientific program is remarkably difficult: what exactly should be counted as a benefit related to mapping out the genome? The groundwork laid by the HGP helped scientists discover certain genes that—just for example—play a large role in some forms of skin cancer, which then helped pharmaceutical companies develop targeted therapies specific to those cases, which have helped those people live a little bit longer than in the past. How do we quantify that? Each patient who now lives a year longer is an economic boon—ignoring the obvious impact on those individuals’ and their families’ personal lives, of course—but what about the money spent by the pharma company to develop the drug? The salaries of those researchers, not paid by government? And so on; summing up the benefits and costs is an immense and not particularly standardized challenge.
One science policy analyst at the University of Georgia, Barry Bozeman, described this issue to Nature: “Coming up with a valid number for the impacts of investments in programs that are extremely complex with extremely diffuse impacts—it’s really, really daunting.”8
In other words, the researchers can indeed be forgiven for their $140-to-$1 number originally quoted, just as the Nobel Prize committee can’t be faulted for what was still a general scientific consensus at the time of Moniz’s lobotomy prize. But politicians who use the science—they should be careful to use the best available consensus at the present time.
In the specific case of Obama and the HGP, his looseness with numbers really could have an impact: the president was asking Congress to fund his medical research initiative, and though its goals were likely universally agreed upon—cure disease and so on—the specifics of how much money to spend certainly were not. If notoriously stingy Congress and its members could point out that Obama seemed to have an overinflated sense of the return on these scientific investments, that could stand as an argument to withhold funding. Getting the science right is always the best bet.
SOMETIMES THE BLIND EYE TO FOLLOW-UP is based on ignorance—willful or otherwise—of a second study, a newer version of older science. And sometimes it is based on wholesale ignoring of an enormous, widely reported topic. Enter the Climategate “scandal.”
First, a quick history on this controversy: In November 2009, a still-unknown attacker hacked a server at the Climatic Research Unit, or CRU, at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. This server contained thousands of e-mails sent between climate scientists at CRU and other parties around the world, which thus became public. Climate deniers began sorting through these e-mails and pulling out some choice, totally-out-of-context quotations that they claimed blew the entire global warming “conspiracy” sky-high. They argued that there was clear evidence of tampering with data, of collusion between scientists to report higher amounts of warming than really existed, and so on. All of that was utterly and completely false.
The uproar was truly uproarious; there turned out to be a whole lot of smoke but no fire at all in the CRU e-mails. At least eight separate investigations looked into the entire issue or into certain individuals’ roles in the scandal, and none found even a hint of wrongdoing. This is where the BLIND EYE TO FOLLOW-UP comes in: before those investigations, an honest politician could perhaps mention Climategate with concern about how science was being done, but that honesty should have led the same politicians to dismiss the entire ordeal as a nonissue once the investigations were completed. Such reasoned thinking is, of course, asking too much of some of our elected officials.
Let’s return to an interview given by Alabama representative Gary Palmer, whom we met in Chapter 5 (BLAME THE BLOGGER) arguing that some guy on the Internet had blown open the “biggest science scandal ever.” Palmer, while primarily highlighting those new totally false and misleading reports about temperature data “manipulation,” also managed to get in a dig about Climategate:
I mean, I wrote about this a couple of years ago, when it came out that the scientists at East Anglia University in England had done this, and that was the data that the United Nations report was based on. It was a huge scandal, there were emails going around where they were, the scientists were literally talking about how they were going to change the data. We are building an entire agenda on falsified data that will have an enormous impact on the economy.9
Okay, Palmer said he “wrote about this a couple of years ago”; had he not read any news since then? If he had, he might have seen that every investigation, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the US Department of Commerce’s Inspector General10 to others in the United Kingdom, refuted his telling of the story.
Here is an excerpt from one such UK investigation, informally known as the Oxburgh Report, comprising an international panel of experts assembled by the University of East Anglia itself and by the Royal Society, Britain’s answer to the US National Academy of Sciences:
We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganized researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal.11
Back in the United States, here’s how the EPA characterized its findings, specifically in response to deniers’ petition to reconsider a finding allowing the agency to regulate greenhouse gases:
Petitioners say that emails disclosed from CRU provide evidence of a conspiracy to manipulate data. The media coverage after the emails were released was based on email statements quoted out of context and on unsubstantiated theories of conspiracy. The CRU emails do not show either that the science is flawed or that the scientific process has been compromised. EPA carefully reviewed the CRU emails and found no indication of improper data manipulation or misrepresentation of results.12
The other reports found essentially the same thing: literally no independent investigation has concluded there were nefarious goings-on of any kind hidden among the CRU e-mails. These reports—all of them—were released years ago, in 2010, 2011, and so on. And yet there was Palmer, lamenting “an entire agenda [built] on falsified data.”
In some ways, the BLIND EYE TO FOLLOW-UP is among the easier errors in this book to cut through, especially when the topic in question is as widely covered as Climategate. Just read the news! Any consumer of current affairs would have had at least an inkling that Palmer was a bit off, and a quick Google search could confirm that. The challenge, though, arises when it isn’t just one lone congressperson out there, shouting into the void. Yes, Palmer was not alone.
Though many politicians continued to raise the Climategate specter long after the exonerations had begun flying around like confetti, one in particular seems loath to let it go: Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, climate TOAD-in-chief, author of—seriously—a book titled The Greatest Hoax.
Here’s Senator Inhofe in January 2014:
Then of course in ’09 when ClimateGate came, people realized the United Nations committee, the IPCC, had rigged the science on this thing. . . . Now they’re trying to say this cold thing we’re going through is just a bump in the new climate. That isn’t true at all. It is a hoax.13
Of course, “this cold thing” the senator mentions could also be described as “January,” or perhaps “winter.” And Inhofe has not stopped beating this drum; in the summer of 2015 he again claimed that “Climategate should have ended it right there at that time.”14
With most of the errors or missteps we have covered, you’ll notice no attempt to assign intent. How can we know exactly why these elected officials get science wrong in various ways? Sometimes it may be real ignorance or misunderstanding. After all, science is hard for everyone, be they sanitation workers or senators. It requires a remarkable degree of leniency, though, not to see this particular brand of the BLIND EYE TO FOLLOW-UP as intentionally misleading; these officials, Inhofe in particular, are undoubtedly aware of the reports that upended the claims of malfeasance at CRU and elsewhere. They are, it seems, actively choosing to ignore those reports in order to advance their particular political agenda—an agenda that involves blocking any and all action to mitigate climate change. And of course, this sort of obfuscation of an issue has undoubtedly had real impacts; the ministrations of Inhofe and his ilk in the US government played a large role in preventing national and international action on climate change for decades. It took until the twenty-first international meeting in Paris in late 2015 before the world finally managed to unite toward meaningful climate goals, and political meddling of the type seen by Inhofe and Palmer is at the root of that long delay.
FOR A FINAL EXAMPLE of the BLIND EYE TO FOLLOW-UP, we turn to the Frankenfish. More properly known as the AquAdvantage salmon, this genetically engineered (GE) fish grows into a full-sized salmon in half the time as its naturally occurring counterparts. That means less money spent on feeding them, and quicker access to the food source in general. And it means dramatic and angry attacks from politicians.
The salmon is the first-ever example of a genetically modified animal (“GMOs,” genetically modified organisms, is the blanket term for plants and animals made in this way) that the US Food and Drug Administration has approved for consumption. GMOs are a remarkably contentious topic among the public and in Washington, and one that breaks along different party and sociodemographic lines than most others. The most fundamental of arguments against GMOs—which are engineered to do such things as increase crop tolerance to drought or herbicides, to improve nutritional value, or for other benefits—is that we do not know whether these foods are safe for people to eat. If we have fundamentally altered the genes of these plants and animals, who knows whether those changes might affect us somehow?
Though this is a reasonable starting concern, the fact is that there are now decades’ worth of evidence on a variety of GMO foods, from grains and papayas to the corn you likely consume every day in various forms—essentially all of them showing no harm at all.15 Politicians who oppose their introduction or approval, though, tend to ignore the accumulating evidence.
When the FDA approved the AquAdvantage salmon in November 2015,16 Alaska’s two senators and single House representative joined together in condemning the decision, engaging in a hearty BLIND EYE TO FOLLOW-UP. Here’s Senator Lisa Murkowski:
I am livid at the FDA’s announcement to approve genetically engineered “salmon”—what seems to be more science experiment than fish or food.17
Congressman Don Young chimed in as well:
This harebrained decision goes to show that our federal agencies are incapable of using common sense. From the beginning, I’ve said the FDA’s process fails to consider the threats GE fish pose to natural salmon fisheries, including genetic contamination, interbreeding, and direct competition. By embarking on this science experiment, the FDA ignores fundamental risk questions related to our wild fish species and food safety.18
Notably, this is an issue that cuts across party lines, with Democrats as well as Republicans often spewing misinformation about GMOs. California Democratic House member Jared Huffman also released a statement condemning the FDA decision, saying the salmon “has no place in our waters or on America’s dinner plates.” Like Congressman Young, Huffman warned that “the release of a new hybrid animal . . . could pose a danger to our wild salmon populations, damage the ecosystems they live in, and undermine our domestic commercial fisheries.”19
The concerns raised here—safety for consumption, and effects on natural salmon—are completely reasonable! Well, they were reasonable, before the FDA actually studied these things and found the concerns to be unfounded.
The condemnations from Murkowski and Young make it sound as though this were some hasty, rash decision—“Oh cool, genetically modified salmon; sure, you can market that, go right ahead.” In reality, the company that makes the fish—AquaBounty—began its approval flirtation with the FDA two decades ago.20 A slow process of studying the fish followed, and the FDA declared it safe in 2010. The agency spent the next five years reviewing objections before finally offering the approval. This did not happen overnight, and there was plenty of time for critics to follow the process and understand the current state of the science.
That current state is essentially this: the Frankenfish is no different from a regular salmon. The FDA compared data on the GE salmon with normal farm-raised Atlantic salmon. They found no differences with regard to some key hormone levels, and determined “that food from AquAdvantage salmon is as safe to eat as food from non-GE Atlantic salmon.”21 The nutritional profile of the fish was also essentially identical. For all intents and purposes, these are normal fish; they just grow faster.
The science behind GMOs has progressed substantially over the last few decades. Though opponents like to claim that we don’t know anything about their safety, that is completely false. The approval of the salmon is no “science experiment,” as Murkowski claimed; it is the result of a long and arduous process, with the experimentation already in the rearview mirror.
If this Atlantic salmon were genetically engineered,
you wouldn’t be able to tell.
Credit: CSIRO
Congressmen Young and Huffman also highlighted an issue that was reasonable to ask about years ago but has been addressed: the question of whether these fast-growing fish could outcompete wild salmon. The company that makes the GE fish is not dumping them into the ocean; they raise them in inland tanks, with multiple layers of protection between the tanks and any possible route to the ocean. That setup is required by the FDA’s approval. Not only that, but the fish are engineered to be sterile; as any fan of Jurassic Park might tell you, this actually isn’t a foolproof plan, but it adds another assurance that these fish are extremely unlikely to have any effect on wild salmon populations.
When GMOs first hit the scene, questions of safety or environmental effect were appropriate—and they still are, for any new animal or plant that may have a different set of effects or concerns. But a blanket refusal to update one’s views with no regard for the steady march of science is absurd. In the case of the Alaskan politicians, the source of this stubbornness is relatively easy to uncover: the seafood industry is among the state’s most important, contributing 78,500 jobs and $5.8 billion to Alaska,22 so protecting it from encroachment makes sense. For others, the fear of genetic engineering is a more visceral one, rooted in science fiction and apocalyptic scenarios.
Politicians with obvious agendas, of course, aren’t the best judges of science. Here’s how the World Health Organization summarizes the current state of affairs:
GM foods currently available on the international market have passed safety assessments and are not likely to present risks for human health. In addition, no effects on human health have been shown as a result of the consumption of such foods by the general population in the countries where they have been approved.23
Other major scientific bodies say essentially the same thing: we should and will keep testing new GMO products, but as of yet, no harm has been found. This is, unfortunately, a perfect situation for the BLIND EYE TO FOLLOW-UP. Any politician can ignore the latest studies and continue spreading the “genetic engineering is scary” line, and it will take diligent, informed citizens to see through it.
The march of progress in science is often slow and steady, and to keep moving forward we have to pay close attention to each successive step or misstep. If psychiatry had stopped paying attention in 1949, we might still be lobotomizing tens of thousands of troubled and sick individuals around the country and the world. Instead, the scientific community had a prolonged and healthy debate regarding psychosurgery and, in the mid-1950s, largely abandoned lobotomy as it had been practiced in favor of drugs like Thorazine.
Politicians think they can get away with continued support for lobotomy long after that ship has sailed. Don’t let them pick and choose which advancements and developments to embrace and which to ignore. If you pay careful attention to their claims and the ideologies and platforms that underlie them, you can help keep science moving forward.