Do the Words Give the Game Away
I have just re-read Christopher Buckley’s “Thank you for Smoking” and completed “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee Pulwitzer, who is an oncologist (a doctor of Cancer).
I read Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee Pulwitzer Prize winning book because I wanted to better understand what caused my cancer. The book reads more like a thriller. I am glad I read it after my treatment.
I re-read the Christopher Buckley’s fictional story of Nick Naylor, chief spokesperson for Academy of Tobacco Studies, because the book is very funny.
But, both books converge on the use of language by lobbyists in defending their clients’ interests.
Nick Naylor responding to a report in the The New England Journal of Medicine repeats the tell tale lines:
- Where is the data
- This was a double-blind study?
- And how big was the control group?
“Buerger’s diseas has only recently been dianoses. Ut has a complex, indeed, extremleu complex pathology. One of the more complexy pathologies in the filed of circulatory medine… With all respect, I think further study is warranted before science goes looking, noose in hand, to lynch the usual suspects”
Source Thank you for smoking, pages 20-21.
Is this Made Up
Whilst Nick Naylor’s language may seem made up, it is likely to been cut and paste from the tobacco industry.
In the “History of Cancer” the work of
Clarence Little, from the Council of Tobacco Research, comes up. The language Nick Naylor uses to defend tobacco has been used for decades.
Umbrellas Don’t Cause Rain
I have quoted the following section direct from the History of Cancer. The words stand by themselves.
“Little was a strong proponent of the theory that all diseases, including cancer, were essentially hereditary, and that these illnesses, in a form of medical ethnic-cleansing, would eventually carry away those with such predispositions, leaving a genetically enriched population resistant to diseases.
This notion—call it eugenics lite—was equally applied to lung cancer, which he also considered principally the product of a genetic aberration
Smoking, Little argued, merely unveiled that inherent aberration, causing that bad germ to emerge
and unfold in a human body.
Blaming cigarettes for lung cancer, then, was like blaming umbrellas for bringing on the rain.
A correlation, Little insisted, could not be equated with cause.
How could scientists so easily conflate a mere confluence of two events—smoking and lung cancer—with a causal relationship?
Persuading mice to chain-smoke was obviously unlikely to succeed.
1. It was strong: the increased risk of cancer was nearly five- or tenfold in smokers.
2. It was consistent
3. It was specific: tobacco was linked to lung cancer—precisely the site where tobacco smoke enters the body.
4. It was temporal: Doll and Hill had found that the longer one smoked, the greater the increase in risk.
5. It possessed a “biological gradient”: the more one smoked in quantity, the greater the risk for lung cancer.
6. It was plausible: a mechanistic link between an inhaled carcinogen and a malignant change in the lung was not implausible. It was coherent; it was backed by experimental evidence
Can you not infer causality by using that list of criteria?”
Smoking Does Not Harm Mice
What about the mice? A recurring theme in the History of Cancer is whether you need animal testing to establish causality? Some cancers, like asbestos, even tobacco smoke, the most common human carcinogen, does not easily induce lung cancer in mice. Bruce Ames’s bacterial test does not register asbestos as a mutagen. The tobacco made great play that mice found it hard to get lung cancer.