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AuthorLevy, Robert A.

Why many activists prefer personal attacks to scientific debate.

A few years ago, when Vice President Al Gore provided ABC's Nightline with supposedly incriminating material on some "anti-environmentalists," he probably never guessed that Ted Koppel would allow the accused to defend themselves. Unhappily for Gore, global warming skeptics Fred Singer and Pat Michaels refused to acknowledge that their work was corrupted just because they received money from the Unification Church and the coal industry. Gore's campaign to discredit researchers who wouldn't back the administration's environmental agenda prompted this concluding on-the-air comment from Koppel: "There is some irony in the fact that Vice President Gore, one of the most scientifically literate men to sit in the White House in this century, is resorting to political means to achieve what should ultimately be resolved on a purely scientific basis."

Why do some advocates stoop to such tactics? Evidently, they believe their exalted ends justify repugnant means. And the shakier their science, the more venomous their invective. Consider Stanton Glantz, the University of California at San Francisco professor who spearheaded the crusade against secondhand smoke in California. In a 1995 appearance on ABC radio, he objected to published research questioning the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, charging its author with "aiding and abetting...efforts to kill people." Nevermind that the author, Dr. Julian Lee, is a distinguished thoracic physician who has publicly supported smoke-free workplaces and vigorously condemned the tobacco industry. Lee apparently crossed the line when he stated, "To achieve...a smoke-free society, it isn't necessary to invoke junk science."

Ad hominem assaults have become an indispensable tool for the perversion of scientific evidence by political activists--especially, it seems, among tobacco's foes. Anti-smoking activists like Glantz have too often been willing to sacrifice science to politics, with little regard for truth. I recently experienced an illuminating example of such misplaced zeal.

It started with an article by Dr. Michael Siegel, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health and at the time a board member of Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights (ANR), the California activist group that Glantz co-founded. Titled "Responding to Tobacco Industry Attacks on the Scientific Evidence Linking Secondhand Smoke to Disease and Death," it was...

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