“Invention does not consist of creating out of void, but out of chaos.”
The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia is home to the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial. Founded in 1824, it’s one of the oldest science education centers in the United States. In 2014, the institute featured “101 Inventions That Changed the World.” When I visited this exhibition with my son, who is a science writer, we tried to guess which inventions made the list. We got a lot of them right, but some were surprising.
The top three inventions were pasteurization, paper, and controlled fire; rounding out the list were the sail, air-conditioning, and the Global Positioning System (GPS). Among others were the telephone, cloning, the alphabet, penicillin, the spinning wheel, vaccination, transistor radios, email, and aspirin. Two inventions that my son and I would never have predicted were gunpowder (number 20) and the atomic bomb (number 30)—both of which have arguably done far more harm than good. This suggested the possibility of another list: “101 Inventions That Changed the World—For the Worse.”
During the past few years, I’ve asked doctors, scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, skeptics, and friends to provide a list of what they think were the world’s worst inventions. In the end, I had about 50 from which to choose. Initially, I thought I’d limit the list to discoveries that had caused the most deaths (like explosives). Then I focused only on those that had harmed the environment (like the refrigerant Freon). In the end, I settled on inventions that were not only the most surprising (at least to me) but also ones whose impact is still felt today.
HERE ARE THE SEVEN FINALISTS:
Six thousand years ago, the Sumerians discovered a plant called hul gil, “the plant of joy,” which gave birth to a drug that now kills 20,000 Americans every year. More young adults die from this drug than from motor vehicle accidents.
In 1901, a German scientist performed an experiment that revolutionized the food industry. A hundred years later, an editorial in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine stated, “On a per calorie basis, [this product] appears to increase the risk of heart disease more than any other macronutrient.” The Harvard School of Public Health estimated that eliminating it from the American diet would prevent 250,000 heart-related deaths every year.
In 1909, another German scientist invented a chemical reaction that won the Nobel Prize, allowed us to feed more than seven billion people across the globe, and unless we do something about it, will probably end life on this planet.
In 1916, a New York City conservationist wrote a scientific treatise that caused Congress to pass a series of draconian immigration laws, enabled the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of American citizens, and provided a scientific rationale for Adolf Hitler to murder six million Jews. Echoes of this treatise can be heard today when politicians like Donald Trump denounce Mexican immigrants, calling them “rapists” and “murderers.”
In 1935, a Portuguese neurologist invented a surgical cure for psychiatric disorders that won a Nobel Prize, took only five minutes to perform, caused President John F. Kennedy’s sister to be permanently disabled, and is now a subject of horror films. Remnants of this dangerous quick-fix procedure can be found today in promised cures for one of the most common psychiatric disorders of childhood: autism.
In 1962, a popular naturalist—the mother of the modern environmental movement—wrote a book that led to the ban of one particular pesticide. The prohibition was hailed by environmental activists but feared by public health officials. Their fears were well founded; as a consequence of the ban, tens of millions of children died needlessly.
In 1966, with the power of two Nobel Prizes behind him, an American chemist elevated the word “antioxidant” into the pantheon of can’t-miss marketing terms. Unfortunately, those who have followed his advice have only increased their risks of cancer and heart disease. Worse, he gave birth to an industry whose harm can be found today in the sudden need for liver transplants in Hawaii or in the strange onset of masculinizing symptoms in women in the Northeast.
ALL OF THESE STORIES ARE UNITED by a myth that dates back to 700 B.C.—the myth of unintended consequences. Zeus, angry that Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods, was intent on punishing mankind. So he gave a marvelous jeweled box to Pandora—its contents, a secret. When Pandora opened the box, which she had been warned not to do, a stream of ghostly creatures representing disease, poverty, misery, sadness, death, and all manner of evil escaped. Pandora closed the box, but too late. Only hope remained.
Science can be Pandora’s beautiful box. And our curiosity about what science can offer has allowed us, in some cases, to unleash evils that have caused much suffering and death. In one case, it probably sowed the seeds of our eventual destruction. Because these stories start at the beginning of recorded history and extend to the present day, the lesson of Pandora’s box remains unlearned.
As a scientist who has worked on vaccines for the past 35 years, I have witnessed both the joy of science as a panacea and the sadness of unintended consequences. For example, the oral polio vaccine, which eliminated polio from the Western hemisphere and is still used throughout the world, can itself cause polio. Although this side effect is rare, it’s real. A rotavirus vaccine given to infants in the United States for ten months between 1998 and 1999 before it was withdrawn was a rare cause of intestinal blockage: One child died as a consequence. A swine flu vaccine given in Europe and Scandinavian countries in 2009 was found to cause a rare but permanent disorder of wakefulness called narcolepsy. All of these inventions were well intentioned, all protected against potentially fatal infections, and all resulted in some level of tragedy.
FOR EACH OF THE SEVEN INVENTIONS that follow, we’ll analyze how their deadly outcomes might have been avoided. Then, in the final chapter, we’ll apply what we’ve learned to modern-day discoveries such as e-cigarettes, chemical resins, autism cures, cancer-screening programs, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to see if we can distinguish a scientific advance from a scientific tragedy in the making, to see whether we have learned from our past or have once again opened Pandora’s box. The conclusions, no doubt, will surprise you.