Rumor mongers: "neutral" technocrats sign on to anti-technology smear campaigns.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia
• Position: Editorial

If you want to hurt an upstart product, one of the most effective techniques is to start an unfounded rumor - to play on public suspicions and force the maker to prove its innocence. You can start spreading the word, for instance, that urine got into the beer or that the soda pop makes black men sterile. You can taint your target even among people who don't quite believe the allegations. Why, after all, should they take a chance?

Such rumors have hurt actual products; the beer and soda examples are real. But those rumors have gotten harsh treatment in the press. Debunkers attack the stories as malicious and paranoid. And any competitor caught spreading such falsehoods would be subject to serious civil action.

If, however, you are attacking not just a single product but a whole technological category, everything changes. Then you're an idealist. You don't have to keep to the shadows. You can take out full-page ads in newspapers and plant stories with TV news magazines. You can block innovations you dislike by falsely accusing them of terrible dangers. And you can get the government to help you.

Back in 1970, that's what people who hated the birth-control pill did. Under the leadership of Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisc.), an anti-technology ideologue now known primarily as the father of Earth Day, the Senate held hearings that scared the hell out of American women. Their message was that the pill was highly dangerous, a threat to women's health, even to their lives.

The lead witness, Dr. Hugh J. Davis of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, denounced oral contraceptives as a "medically unsound" interference with nature: "The synthetic chemicals in the pill are quite unnatural with respect to their manufacture and with respect to their behavior once they are introduced into the human body....It seems to me extremely unwise to officially license, sponsor, and encourage a long-range experiment such as we have now in progress on the effects of chronic ingestion of synthetic hormones by millions of women." In particular, he invoked "the nagging specter of cancer," breast cancer in particular. Use of the pill plummeted overnight.

Today, about a third of women tell pollsters that they associate oral contraceptives with increased cancer risk - although the link to breast cancer has never been proven, and oral contraceptives actually prevent ovarian and endometrial cancer. By avoiding the pill, American women are increasing their cancer risk. And...