What do we know about the possible poisons that industrial technologies leave in our air and water? How reliable is the science that federal regulators and legislators use to protect the public from dangerous products?
Drawing together a host of little-known but dramatic cases, Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research, by CPR Member Scholars Thomas O. McGarity and Wendy Wagner, comprehensively documents what has been suspected for years: how extensively scientific data are misused and abused in regulatory and tort law. Sound science is critical to the public policy process, particularly where health and safety issues are concerned. But as Professors McGarity and Wagner show, many interest groups do all they can to influence and undermine independent and honest research, in an effort to bend science to their ideological will.
The perpetrators of the attacks on science include corporations, plaintiff attorneys, think tanks, and even government agencies. The book describes the range of sophisticated legal and financial tactics political and corporate advocates use to discredit or suppress research on potential human health hazards. Scientists have had their research blocked and found themselves threatened with financial ruin.
Bending Science shows just how far science has been corrupted, and offers a road to reform.
- Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research, by CPR Member Scholars and University of Texas Law Professors Thomas O. McGarity and Wendy Wagner, published by Harvard University Press May 2008, is available on Amazon.com or from Harvard University Press.
- Read a recent Dallas Morning news op-ed article by author Thomas O. McGarity, in which he says that revelations about ghost-written Vioxx research are a warning about the dangers of "tort reform."
