STANDING up for what you believe in can be tough. Sometimes it鈥檚 got to be
done, but the price can be high indeed.
Biochemist Jeffrey Wigand found this out the hard way when he took on his
former employer, tobacco giant Brown & Williamson, over its claim that
cigarettes were not addictive. So too did climate modeller Ben Santer when he
put his name to a UN report which argued that it is people who are warming the
planet. Both men found themselves under sustained attacks, Wigand from Brown
& Williamson, Santer from the combined might of the oil and car industries
(see 鈥淭obacco wars鈥� and
鈥淲here angels fear to tread鈥�).
The two men got into their dreadful predicaments by totally different routes.
But they had one thing in common鈥攖hey fought powerful vested interests
with scientific data that those interests wished would go away.
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Commercial companies are not, of course, the only vested interests in town.
Governments have a habit of backing the ideas of whoever pays the most tax.
Academia also has its version: scientific theories often come with fragile egos
and reputations still attached, and supporters of those theories can be overly
resistant to new ideas.
For example, Alfred Wegener鈥檚 idea that the continents drift across the
surface of the planet was scoffed at when he proposed it in 1915. This idea was
only accepted finally in the 1960s, when plate tectonics came of age. More
recently, in 1982, Stanley Prusiner was labelled a crank for his controversial
suggestion that infectious diseases such as scrapie, CJD and BSE were caused by
a protein that self-replicated. A decade later, the notion had gained ground.
Finally, in 1997, he received a Nobel prize for his idea.
Western science has always thrived on individualism鈥攐ne person鈥檚
ambition to topple a theory. So independence of thought is crucial. But this
applies not only for scientists, but also their institutions. With government
and commercial sponsors increasingly pulling the strings of university
research鈥攑erhaps it鈥檚 time to spend some lottery money, say, on truly
independent research. Overcoming scientists鈥� inertia will be much more
difficult.
Yet we cannot afford to be slow to hear new ideas and adapt to them. Back in
the 1950s, if governments had taken seriously the findings of epidemiologist
Richard Doll about the link between smoking and lung cancer, millions of people
would have been spared disability and premature death. Since the 1970s,
scientific, governmental and commercial sluggishness in accepting global warming
has condemned many Pacific islands to salty graves. And in recent years, if the
British government had heeded warnings from a few of its own scientists about
the potential dangers of BSE, would so many people have died of CJD? The price
of resistance is tragedy.
