Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives - Michael Specter (2009)
INTRODUCTION
Ten years ago, while walking through Harvard Yard, I saw a student wearing a button that said “Progressives against Scientism.” I had no idea what that meant, so I asked him. Sci entism, he explained, is the misguided belief that scientists can solve problems that nature can’t. He reeled off a series of technologies that demonstrated the destructiveness of what he called the “scientific method approach” to life: genetically modified foods, dams, nuclear power plants, and pharmaceuticals all made the list. We talked for a few minutes, then I thanked him and walked away. I didn’t understand how science might be responsible for the many scars humanity has inflicted upon the world, but students have odd intellectual infatuations, and I let it slip from my mind.
Over the next few years, while traveling in America and abroad, I kept running into different versions of that student, people who were convinced that, largely in the name of science, we had trespassed on nature’s ground. The issues varied, but not the underlying philosophy. Society had somehow forgotten what was authentic and there was only one effective antidote: embrace a simpler, more “natural” way of life. No phenomenon has illustrated those goals more clearly than persistent opposition to genetically engineered food. “This whole world view that genetically modified food is there so we have no choice but to use it is absolutely terrifying and it is wrong,” Lord Peter Melchett, a former British Labour minister, told me when I met him a few years ago.
Today, Lord Melchett, whose great-grandfather founded one of the world’s largest chemical companies, is policy director of the British Soil Association, the organic food and farming organization. The first time we spoke, however, he served as executive director of Greenpeace, where he was in the midst of leading a furious campaign against Monsanto (which he referred to as “Monsatan”) to rid the world of genetically engineered foods. “There is a fundamental question here,” he said. “Is progress really just about marching forward? We say no. We say it is time to stop assuming that discoveries only move us forward. The war against nature has to end. And we are going to stop it.”
I felt then—as I do now—that he had gotten it exactly wrong; scientists weren’t waging a war at all, he was—against science itself. Still, I saw Lord Melchett as a quaint aristocrat who found an interesting way to shrug off his family’s industrial heritage. His words were hard to forget, though, and I eventually came to realize why: by speaking about a “war against nature,” he had adopted a system of belief that can only be called denialism. Denialists like Lord Melchett replace the rigorous and open-minded skepticism of science with the inflexible certainty of ideological commitment.
We have all been in denial at some point in our lives; faced with truths too painful to accept, rejection often seems the only way to cope. Under those circumstances, facts, no matter how detailed or irrefutable, rarely make a difference. Denialism is denial writ large—when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie.
Denialism comes in many forms, and they often overlap. Denialists draw direct relationships where none exist—between childhood vaccinations, for example, and the rising incidence of diseases like diabetes, asthma, and autism. They conflate similar but distinct issues and treat them as one—blending the results of different medical studies on the same topic, or confusing a general lack of trust in pharmaceutical companies with opposition to the drugs they manufacture and even to the very idea of science.
Unless data fits neatly into an already formed theory, a denialist doesn’t really see it as data at all. That enables him to dismiss even the most compelling evidence as just another point of view. Instead, denialists invoke logical fallacies to buttress unshakable beliefs, which is why, for example, crops created through the use of biotechnology are “frankenfoods” and therefore unlike anything in nature. “Frankenfoods” is an evocative term, and so is “genetically modified food,” but the distinctions they seek to draw are meaningless. All the food we eat, every grain of rice and ear of corn, has been manipulated by man; there is no such thing as food that hasn’t been genetically modified.
Our ability to cut genes from one organism and paste them into another has transformed agriculture. But it is a change of degree, not of type. Denialists refuse to acknowledge that distinction, in part because it’s so much simpler to fix blame on a company, an institution, or an idea than to grapple with a more complicated truth: that while scientific progress has brought humanity immense wealth and knowledge, it has also caused global pollution severe enough to threaten the planet. Denialists shun nuance and fear complexity, so instead of asking how science might help resolve our problems, they reject novel strategies even when those strategies are supported by impressive data and powerful consensus.
Until I learned about Holocaust deniers, it never occurred to me that a large group could remain willfully ignorant of the most hideous truths. Then, twenty-five years ago, I began to write about people who refused to acknowledge that the human immunodeficiency virus caused AIDS, despite what, even then, was an overwhelming accretion of evidence. Holocaust deniers and AIDS denialists are intensely destructive—even homicidal—but they don’t represent conventional thought and they never will. This new kind of denialism is less sinister but more pervasive than that.
My unusual encounter at Harvard came back to me a few years ago, and I started to think about writing this book. I kept putting it off, though. Some of the delay was due simply to procrastination. But there was another, more important reason for my hesitation: I had assumed these nagging glimpses of irrationality were aberrations, tiny pockets of doubt. Authority may be flawed, and science often fails to fulfill its promises. Nonetheless, I was convinced that people would come around to realizing that the “scientific method approach”—the disciplined and dispassionate search for knowledge—has been the crowning intellectual achievement of humanity. I guess I was in my own kind of denial, because even as things got worse I kept assuring myself that reason would prevail and a book like this would not be necessary.
Finally, a couple of years ago, I was invited to dinner at the home of a prominent, well-read, and worldly woman. She asked what I was working on and I told her that I had become mystified by the fact that so many Americans seemed to question the fundamental truths of science and their value to society. I mentioned as examples anxiety about agricultural biotechnology, opposition to vaccinations, and the growing power of the alternative health movement.
She suddenly became animated. “It’s about time somebody writes the truth about these pharmaceutical companies,” she cried. “They are evil, making vast sums from lifestyle drugs like Viagra and letting millions die instead of helping them. The government is no better; they are destroying our food supply and poisoning our water.” Some years earlier she had been seriously ill, and she explained how she recovered: by taking dozens of vitamins every day, a practice she has never abandoned. With this woman’s blessing, her daughter, who had just given birth, declined to vaccinate her baby.
The woman didn’t actually say, “It’s all a conspiracy,” but she didn’t have to. Denialism couldn’t exist without the common belief that scientists are linked, often with the government, in an intricate web of lies. When evidence becomes too powerful to challenge, collusion provides a perfect explanation. (“What reason could the government have for approving genetically modified foods,” a former leader of the Sierra Club once asked me, “other than to guarantee profits for Monsanto?”)
“You have a point,” I told the woman. “I really ought to write a book.” I decided to focus on issues like food, vaccinations, and our politically correct approach to medicine, because in each of those arenas irrational thought and frank denialism have taken firm root. Today, anyone who defends science—particularly if he suggests that pharmaceutical companies or giant agricultural conglomerates may not be wholly evil—will be called a shill.
That’s denialism, too—joined as it often is with an almost religious certainty that there is a better, more “natural” way to solve our medical and environmental problems. Answers are rarely that simple, though. Even in the case of the drug Vioxx, which I describe in the next chapter—where Merck was as guilty of mal feasance as a company can be—it’s likely that had the drug remained on the market, it would have been responsible for a hundred times more good than harm.
The most blatant forms of denialism are rarely malevolent; they combine decency, a fear of change, and the misguided desire to do good—for our health, our families, and the world. That is why so many physicians dismiss the idea that a patient’s race can, and often should, be used as a tool for better diagnoses and treatment. Similar motivations—in other words, wishful thinking—have helped drive the growing national obsession with organic food. We want our food to taste good, but also to be safe and healthy. That’s natural. Food is more than a meal, it’s about history, culture, and a common set of rituals. We put food in the mouths of our children; it is the glue that unites families and communities. And because we don’t see our food until we eat it, any fear attached to it takes on greater resonance.
The corrosive implications of this obsession barely register in America or Europe, where calories are cheap and food is plentiful. But in Africa, where arable land is scarce, science offers the only hope of providing a solution to the growing problem of hunger. To suggest that organic vegetables, which cost far more than conventional produce, can feed billions of people in parts of the world without roads or proper irrigation may be a fantasy based on the finest intentions. But it is a cruel fantasy nonetheless.
Denialist arguments are often bolstered by accurate information taken wildly out of context, wielded selectively, and supported by fake experts who often don’t seem fake at all. If vast factory farms inject hormones and antibiotics into animals, which is often true and always deplorable, then all industrial farming destroys the earth and all organic food helps sustain it. If a pricey drug like Nexium, the blockbuster “purple pill” sold so successfully to treat acid reflux disease, offers few additional benefits to justify its staggering cost, then all pharmaceutical companies always gouge their customers and “natural” alternatives—largely unregulated and rarely tested with rigor—offer the only acceptable solution.
We no longer trust authorities, in part because we used to trust them too much. Fortunately, they are easily replaced with experts of our own. All it takes is an Internet connection. Anyone can seem impressive with a good Web site and some decent graphics. Type the word “vaccination” into Google and one of the first of the fifteen million or so listings that pops up, after the Centers for Disease Control, is the National Vaccine Information Center, an organization that, based on its name, certainly sounds like a federal agency. Actually, it’s just the opposite: the NVIC is the most powerful anti-vaccine organization in America, and its relationship with the U.S. government consists almost entirely of opposing federal efforts aimed at vaccinating children.
IN 2008, America elected a president who supports technological progress and scientific research as fully as anyone who has held the office. Barack Obama even stressed science in his inaugural address. “We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality … and lower its costs,” he said. “We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.”
Obama realizes the urgency with which we need to develop new sources of energy. That is why he frequently compares that effort to America’s most thrilling technological achievement: landing men on the moon. Obama has assembled a uniformly gifted team of scientific leaders, and when he speaks publicly about issues like swine flu or HIV, the president routinely makes a point of saying that he will be guided by their advice.
That is quite a departure from the attitude of his predecessor, who, in one of his first major initiatives, announced that he would prohibit federal funding for research on new stem cell lines. George W. Bush encouraged schools to teach “intelligent design” as an alternative to the theory of evolution, and he all but ignored the destruction of our physical world. His most remarkable act of denialism, however, was to devote one-third of federal HIV- prevention funds to “abstinence until marriage” programs.
The Bush administration spent more than $1 billion on abstinence-only programs, despite data from numerous studies showing that they rarely, if ever, accomplish their goals. Nevertheless, during the Bush administration, family planning organizations in the developing world were denied U.S. grants if they so much as discussed abortion with their clients. President Obama began at once to reverse that legacy and restore the faith in progress so many people had lost.
I wish I could say that he has helped turn back the greater tide of denialism as well. That would be asking too much. Despite the recession, sales of organic products have continued to grow, propelled by millions who mistakenly think they are doing their part to protect their health and improve the planet. Supplements and vitamins have never been more popular even though a growing stack of evidence suggests that they are almost entirely worthless. Anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists, led by the tireless Jenny McCarthy, continue to flourish.
So does denialism, abetted by some of the world’s most prominent celebrities. Oprah Winfrey, for one, has often provided a forum for McCarthy on her show, but she intends to do more: in early 2009, Winfrey’s production company announced that it had hired McCarthy to host a syndicated talk show and write a blog, providing two new platforms from which she can preach her message of scientific illiteracy and fear.
This antipathy toward the ideas of progress and scientific discovery represents a fundamental shift in the way we approach the world in the twenty-first century. More than at any time since Francis Bacon invented what we have come to regard as the scientific method (and Galileo began to put it to use), Americans fear science at least as fully as we embrace it. It is a sentiment that has turned our electrifying age of biological adventure into one of doubt and denial. There have always been people who are afraid of the future, of course—Luddites, ignorant of the possibilities of life on this planet and determined to remain that way. No amount of data will convince climate denialists that humans have caused the rapid, devastating warming of the earth. And no feat of molecular genetics will make a creationist understand that our species has evolved over billions of years, along with every other creature.
Common strains of denialism are even more troubling, though, because they show what happens when unfettered scientific achievement bumps up against the limits of human imagination. Manipulating the genes of cows or corn was only a first step. Today, we routinely intrude on every aspect of human and natural life. That fact traumatizes people—and not entirely without reason. Mary Shelley couldn’t have imagined what goes on in thousands of laboratories today. Scientists all over the world are resurrecting viruses that have been extinct for millions of years. They are constructing organs out of spare parts, and it is only a matter of time (and not much time either) before synthetic biologists design, then grow, entirely new forms of life—organisms that have never before existed in the natural world. The speed at which all this is happening has made many people fear that we are about to lose control, not only over the world we have always viewed as our dominion, but of human life as well.
Nothing scares us quite as much. Controlling life is something we have attempted since we domesticated cattle and began to grow food. The scientific revolution helped solidify the idea that our species was in command and, as Bacon put it in The New Atlantis, able to “establish dominion over nature and effect all things possible.” Yet there have always been committed efforts at stopping the march of technology.
In 1589, Queen Elizabeth refused to fund a project to make a knitting machine, saying, “My lord, I have too much love for my poor people who obtain their bread by knitting to give money that will forward an invention which will tend to their ruin by depriving them of employment.” Three centuries later, in 1863, Samuel Butler became the first to write about the possibility that machines might evolve through Darwinian selection. Although many readers thought he was joking in his essay “Darwin Among the Machines,” Butler was serious (and astonishingly prescient):
There are few things of which the present generation is more justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances… . Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.
If anything, that fear is more pronounced today (and more understandable) than ever before. Denialism is often a natural response to this loss of control, an attempt to scale the world to dimensions we can comprehend. Denialism is not green or religious or anti-intellectual, nor is it confined to utopian dreamers, agrarians, or hippies. It is not right- or left-wing; it is a fear expressed as frequently and with as much fervor by Oxford dons as by bus drivers.
The fear has seeped across Britain, Europe, and the developing world. But nowhere is it more evident than in the United States, a country that has always defined itself by its notion of progress and technological prowess. We may be a nation of immigrants, but more than that we are the nation that invents: from refrigerators to resistors, antibiotics, jets, and cell phones, to the computer software that governs much of our lives and the genetic sequencing technology that will soon begin to do so. What would have seemed like sorcery a century ago is now regarded simply as fact. In 1961, Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Who could make such a statement today? What would magic look like to us? It has become routine to deliver babies months before they are considered alive—not to mention to keep people breathing long after they are, in any meaningful sense, dead. My grandfather died in 1962 at the age of sixty-six. That was exactly how long men born at the turn of the twentieth century were “expected” to live, and while he was mourned, nobody considered his death premature. They certainly would have today, though. Just forty-six years later, a healthy fifty-year-old man can expect to live to the age of eighty.
At least since the Enlightenment, when science effectively replaced religion as the dominant ideology of mankind, progress has been our purpose. We have moved from the discovery of the compass (and our sense of where we are in the physical world) to the invention of gunpowder, to the astonishing ability to take pictures that see through human flesh—only to arrive at the defining event of the twentieth century: the splitting of the atom. As Manhattan Project scientists gathered in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, to await results from the first test of the atomic bomb, they were anxious and afraid. Many took bets on whether they were about to set the sky ablaze and destroy the world.
New technologies are always accompanied by new risks and at least one deeply unsettling fact: once you invent something you cannot uninvent it. That sounds simple, but since that day in New Mexico more than half a century ago that knowledge has changed society, planting seeds of fear into even the most promising discoveries. The superpowers may have averted a cold war and dismantled many of the nuclear weapons that had threatened to annihilate us. But they didn’t uninvent them and they never could. H. G. Wells said that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. He was right. Even more than that, though, civilization is a race between innovation and catastrophe.
That race only grows more frantic. Global nuclear war, while by no means impossible, is a less likely prospect than it was twenty years ago. But there is nothing unlikely about assembling life from scratch, cloning copies of ourselves, or breeding extinct animals. In November 2007, for the first time, researchers successfully cloned embryos from the single cell of an adult monkey. The work put an end to any debate about whether primates—the group that includes not only monkeys but men—are biologically capable of being turned into clones. Faust and Frankenstein have been with us for a long time. But the wall between science fiction and reality has practically vanished, and there is evidence of that in even the most trivial places.
The 2007 film I Am Legend was hardly a cinematic master-piece, but it opens with a scene in which a doctor explains to a TV news anchor how she was able to cure cancer by mutating the measles virus and harnessing its destructive power. She tells him that measles is like “a fast car with a madman at the wheel,” but her team believed it could be used for good if “a cop were driving it instead.” So they used the virus to cure cancer, which was wonderful until the misprogrammed organism wiped out nearly everyone on earth. Like Godard’s film Le Nouveau Monde and the original 1954 book on which both films were based, I Am Legend is pure fiction, another story of a virus gone wild. That doesn’t mean it will be fiction tomorrow.
In early 2009, a team from the Mayo Clinic reported that certain measles strains could prove effective as a treatment for cancer. “These viral strains could represent excellent candidates for clinical testing against advanced prostate cancer,” said Evanthia Galanis, the senior author of the paper. The viral strains were inactivated, harmless, and well contained in a highly secure lab. Nonetheless, it is hard not to recoil when life imitates art so faithfully.
“Of course this is all possible,” Drew Endy said when I asked him whether the theoretical threats posed by the new science of synthetic biology were real. “If we don’t want to exist, we can stop existing now.” Endy is a biological engineer at Stanford University who is essentially attempting to turn human cells into software that we can program. Instead of producing iTunes or spreadsheets, however, this software would attack tumors, repair arteries clogged with cholesterol, and prevent diseased cells from destroying the immune system. Endy is an optimist, but he readily acknowledges the dangers associated with his work. “Why wouldn’t we be afraid?” he said. “We are speaking about creating entirely new forms of life.”
FIFTY YEARS AGO, we venerated technology. At least until we placed our feet on lunar soil, our culture was largely one of uncritical reverence for the glories that science would soon deliver. The dominant image of popular American culture was progress. TV shows like Star Trek and The Jetsons were based on a kind of utopian view of the scientific future. Even the Flintstones were described as a “modern” Stone Age family. We were entering an era without disease or hunger. If we ran out of water we would siphon salt from the seas and make more; if nature was broken we could fix it. If not, we could always move to another planet.
That vision no longer seems quite so enchanting. No doubt our expectations were unreasonable—for science and for ourselves. We also began to recognize the unintended consequences of our undeniable success. About a month before Neil Armstrong made his large step on the moon, the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River erupted in flames near Cleveland, creating an indelible image of industry at war with nature. A few years later, in 1976, Karen Ann Quinlan was removed from life support, igniting the first horrific battle of the modern era over how we live and die. The end of the decade was marked by the ghastly accident at Three Mile Island, which showed more clearly than ever that the effects of the Industrial Revolution were not all benign. The thalidomide disaster, mad cow disease, even the dramatic and sustained lies of Big Tobacco have all contributed to the sense that if the promise of science wasn’t a lie, it wasn’t exactly the truth either.
Today the image of a madman whipping up a batch of small pox, or manufacturing an effective version of bird flu in his kitchen, while not exactly as easy as baking a cake, is no longer so far-fetched. Indeed, if there is anything more frightening than the threat of global nuclear war, it is the certainty that humans not only stand on the verge of producing new life forms but may soon be able to tinker with them as if they were vintage convertibles or bonsai trees.
Our technical and scientific capabilities have brought the world to a turning point, one in which accomplishments clash with expectations. The result often manifests itself as a kind of cultural schizophrenia. We expect miracles, but have little faith in those capable of producing them. Famine remains a serious blight on humanity, yet the leaders of more than one African nation, urged on by rich Europeans who have never missed a meal, have decided it would be better to let their citizens starve than to import genetically modified grains that could feed them.
Food is a compelling example of how fear has trumped science, but it is not the only evidence that we are waging a war against progress, rather than, as Peter Melchett would have it, against nature. The issues may be complex but the choices are not: we are either going to embrace new technologies, along with their limitations and threats, or slink into an era of magical thinking. Humanity has nearly suffocated the globe with carbon dioxide, yet nuclear power plants that produce no such emissions are so mired in objections and obstruction that, despite renewed interest on every continent, it is unlikely another will be built in the United States. Such is the opposition to any research involving experiments with animals that in scores of the best universities in the world, laboratories are anonymous, unmarked, and surrounded by platoons of security guards.
For hundreds of years we had a simple but stunningly effective approach to our interaction with the physical world: what can be understood, and reliably repeated by experiment, is what nature regarded as true. Now, at the time of mankind’s greatest scientific advances (and our greatest need for them), that deal is off. Snake oil salesmen may be old news in America, but today quacks—whose research is even funded by the federal government—take out ads in the New York Times denouncing scientists who rely on evidence-based medicine to treat our most devastating diseases.
We are now able to stare so deeply into the molecular history of the human genome that, peering one hundred million years into the past, we can see that we shared a common ancestor with the elephant. Scientists are tantalizingly close to understanding how the trillions of cells in our bodies work and interact with each other. Nonetheless, in 2007, a $27 million Creation Museum opened in Kentucky, complete with bumper stickers that proclaim “We’re Taking Dinosaurs Back.” That’s fitting, since no matter how you ask the question, at least one in three American adults rejects the concept of evolution, believing instead that humans descended from heaven several thousand years ago in our present form.
Science and religion have always clashed and always will. Einstein put it best: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. In the past, that conflict, while often painful, never managed to derail progress. We can no longer say that. If anything, our increasingly minute knowledge of the origins of humanity has served only to fuel the intelligent design movement, not to dampen it. In 2005, when the American Museum of Natural History mounted the most significant exhibition ever devoted to Charles Darwin, the leadership there couldn’t find a single corporate sponsorship, as they always had been able to do in the past. Few American companies were willing to risk a boycott staged by those who object to the theory of evolution.
Denialism must be defeated. There is simply too much at stake to accept any other outcome. Who doesn’t have a family member with diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, or some form of cancer? When faced with genuine solutions (not just promises) to such terrible fates, few will continue to question the value of stem cell research or cloning. Even Nancy Reagan, whose husband served as commander-in-chief of the American war against legal abortion, became an ardent and vocal supporter of stem cell research after watching him submit to the dark fog of Alzheimer’s disease.
We have acquired more knowledge in the past decade than in the previous two centuries. Even bad news soon proves its worth. Look at avian influenza: bird flu may cause a devastating epidemic. Viruses, like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, will always be part of life on earth. (Not long before he died, Nobel Prize-winning biologist Joshua Lederberg told me that the “single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on this planet is the virus.” He was not alone in believing that.) Nonetheless, avian influenza is the first potential pandemic in the history of humanity that can be understood even before it becomes contagious. Researchers have mapped every gene and protein in the virus and are well on their way to developing a vaccine.
Science has slowly come to define us. In 1959, C. P. Snow delivered his “Two Cultures” speech at Cambridge University, in which he asserted that the chasm between the worlds of science and the humanities was making it hard to solve the earth’s most pressing problems. He had a point at the time. But we don’t have two cultures anymore, we have one. Students in many classrooms seek answers to the remaining intricacies contained within the human genome, and if they don’t understand their research they can always turn to the Internet to find an eager tutor from one of a dozen nations. In India and China, young engineers and biologists use Skype to conduct videoconferences with colleagues from Boston to Berlin. It costs nothing. Two generations ago, in the unlikely event that their grandparents had known how to write a letter, they would never have been able to afford postage stamps or find a place to mail it.
Ultimately, dramatic achievements have always taken us past our fears and overcome denialism—because progress offers hope and for humans nothing beats hope. Fear might threaten progress; in the end, though, it won’t prevent it. Not long ago, after publishing a piece in the New Yorker on scientists who were reconstructing extinct viruses, I received this letter: “Not discounting the great advances we have made with molecular biology over the last twenty-five years, I dare say the question remains … will this generation of scientists be labeled the great minds of the amazing genetic-engineering era, or the most irresponsible scientists in the history of the world? With the present posture of the scientific community, my money, unfortunately, is on the latter.”
Those words might as well have been torn from a denialist instruction manual: change is dangerous; authorities are not to be trusted; the present “posture” of the scientific community has to be one of collusion and conspiracy. Most important, the facts are inside out, because “discounting” the great advances of molecular biology is exactly what the author of that letter did.
Scientists should do a better job of explaining the nature and the potential impact of their work (and so should those of us who write about science). We need to have open debates—on national television and guided by people like President Obama—about how to engage the future and make sense of both the possibilities and risks that lie ahead. Education will have to improve as well. But to call the group that has decoded the language of life, and has already begun to use that information to treat and prevent scores of diseases, “the most irresponsible scientists in the history of the world” is specious. Without the tools of molecular biology, we wouldn’t have a clue how the AIDS virus works. Instead of having killed twenty-five million people in the twentieth century and infected an even larger number, the toll of such an unimpeded epidemic would have already numbered in the billions.
No achievement of modern technology, not even nuclear power, has been more bitterly disputed than our ability to alter the genetic composition of food or to create artificial products from human cells. Yet no discovery is more likely to provide solutions to the greatest threat the earth has ever faced: the rapid pace of global warming. If we do not develop clean technologies soon, our species won’t survive.
And we are doing just that. Researchers throughout the country and the world are fabricating synthetic molecules that mimic those found in nature. Ten years ago there wasn’t even enough basic knowledge to attempt this kind of research. These companies are not interested in making fake corn or pursuing effective ways to manufacture fertilizer for farmers who really don’t need it. Instead, they seek to fuel cars and power factories without releasing greenhouse gases. That would not only keep us from blanketing the earth in carbon dioxide, but would go a long way toward counteracting the foolish and expedient decision to make fuel from the corn, sugar, and soybeans that the rapidly growing population of the world so desperately needs to eat.
To accomplish any of this we will have to recognize denialism when we see it. As a society and as individuals, that means asking tough, skeptical questions, then demanding answers supported by compelling evidence. When the government, a company, or any other group makes a claim, we need to scrutinize that claim with care but without passion. Most importantly, we must learn to accept data that has been properly judged and verified—no matter what it says, or how much we might have wished that it pointed in another direction.
I wonder, as the ice sheet in Greenland disappears, the seas rise, and our sense of planetary foreboding grows, will denialists consider the genetically engineered organisms that propel our cars and sustain our factories as a continuation of what Lord Melchett described as a war against nature? Or will they see them for what they are, the latest—and grandest—stage in our march toward human enrichment?