In this book, readers learned the fascinating and frightening story of the lengths to which government will go to protect its policies, even when they endanger human health, agriculture, and the environment. The unethical and illegal methods that EPA used to silence one of its own who refused to accept such a policy were described and documented in great detail.
The government’s methods included deception, fraud, data manipulation, corruption of the peer review process, false accusations, and false and misleading information posted on government webpages and then disseminated to the media, as huge amounts of public funds were spent in an attempt to prevent Lewis from uncovering the body of deceptive scientific literature it created to support its policy.
Every avenue Lewis took to restore scientific integrity within his agency was met with one insurmountable roadblock after another. He persisted, filing lawsuits on behalf of injured sludge victims and farmers, arranging congressional hearings, taking the battle to influential congressional leaders of both parties, and even to the highest level at the White House.
This book exposes a completely new level of government corruption. Agencies tolerate, and even support, bad policies and yield to industry pressure to avoid strengthening regulations that put the public at risk. In this case the government itself initiated just such a policy, and then aggressively used the nation’s resources to engage academia, industry-paid scientists, and industry lobbyists to help promote and protect that policy.
Then Lewis spent over a year sifting through all of the documents used in the legal proceedings against Andrew Wakefield, including key evidence that was withheld from the public, which would have exonerated this scientist. But it was too late. By then, every major science and global news organization had published Deer’s allegations that Wakefield had committed scientific fraud by deliberately misrepresenting data.
Until Nature reporter Eugenie Reich attended Lewis’s presentation at Harvard University and interviewed Fiona Godlee of the British Medical Journal about the documents Lewis uncovered, no mainstream investigative reporter ever questioned the veracity of Deer’s false allegations. Even if reporters had investigated the charges, the skills needed to uncover the deception could only have been provided by an expert, trained and experienced in interpreting the relevant medical data. Lewis was that expert.
Others have offered suggestions on how to deal with corporate corruption of science, and the kinds of legislative changes needed to support and protect researchers who work for the public interest.1 It remains to be seen if any of these recommendations will be implemented to restore research integrity. Scientists working for the public interest should not be forced to devote a large proportion of their productive years to filing expensive lawsuits to clear their name and set the record straight.2 Nor should they have to “give and hazard all they have”: their career, their reputation, and their livelihood, in order to overcome government and industry wrongdoing.3
—Caroline Snyder
Emeritus Professor
College of Liberal Arts
Rochester Institute of Technology4