The Secret History of the War on Cancer, by Devra Davis, 2007. Basic Books, $27.95 hardcover.
The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, 2007. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, $24.95 hardcover.
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The Secret History of the War on Cancer
by Devra Davis, 2007. Basic Books, $27.95 hardcover.
by Carol Van Strum
"Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing."
-- Voltaire (1694-1778)
Some books make you proud to be human. This is not one of them. Nor is it a book to read all at once, especially not at bedtime, lest suicide begin to appear downright comforting. One by one, with surgical precision, Davis dissects and shreds every illusion we've ever cherished about the altruism of medicine or the integrity of science.
With that caveat, The Secret History of the War on Cancer is a brilliant, long-overdue exposé of one of the longest-running confidence tricks in history. The much-touted 40-year-old war on cancer, it appears, is as much a scam as the current war on terrorism, and just as profitable. The trouble with profitable wars is that those who profit from them have a strong vested interest in perpetuating them. Davis tracks how the accumulation and protection of profit have controlled the "war on cancer" from the start.
Well before the dawn of the 20th Century, the link between particular occupations and certain cancers was recognized by the medical profession, and by the 1930s tobacco, radiation, benzene, hormones, and other products were known to cause cancer. Research establishing such causes, much of it conducted and published by scientists in Nazi Germany, was actively suppressed after World War II ended, when U.S. industry adapted war-time production to domestic markets. At that point, the rapid growth of radio, television, and movies expanded the reach of advertising to new, unprecedented realms, placing an entire nation in thrall to snake-oil salesmen.
Here's how it worked - and continues to work today:
- A product or process (e.g., tobacco or x-rays) is released on the market with little or no testing of its safety; any ill effects on the workers who made it are hidden away as "trade secrets."
- The product is then promoted relentlessly until the entire population believes they can't do without it (e.g., DDT, aspartame, or cell phones).
- Eventually, of course, its effects become apparent, and studies suggest that it causes cancer or birth defects or Alzheimer's, but by this time the profits are too huge and the public too addicted to accept reality. Not only is the industry that makes the product threatened by any hint of harm, but so also are all the media/PR/advertising industries that promote it.
- The next thing you know, a vast powerful corporate campaign arises to discredit, suppress, cover up, and belittle the evidence of harm and prevent any government regulation of the product. This is easy for corporations to do, particularly when they control funding of the scientific institutions doing the research. Talk about sick jokes.
- The mindless, gullible, easily controlled public goes right on buying, buying, buying – eager to believe the lies about something they're convinced is essential.
- By the time evidence of harm becomes overwhelming, its hapless victims discover that industry has manipulated the law in order to require impossible absolute proof of a particular product causing a particular cancer, proof that science by definition never can deliver.
Again and again, Davis documents this process, with industry after industry, product after product – a ghastly rogues' gallery of deceit and death. For decades, cancer-causing industries have waged wholesale campaigns to promote doubt about any research implicating their products – a tactic familiar today in PR on global warming, evolution, and other issues affecting economic growth. Even more insidiously, both industry and the medical profession shamelessly created a perpetual profit machine fiendishly disguised as a benign war on cancer. Companies that make carcinogenic products also manufacture cancer treatments that themselves cause more cancers.
"We are spending more money than ever to find and treat cancer – some $100 billion in direct treatment costs in one year," Davis says. "But when it comes to ferreting out the root causes of the disease, we have limped along ineffectively. Why? Could the fact that many of the leading figures in the war on cancer profited both from producing cancer-causing chemicals and from producing anti-cancer drugs have anything to do with the fact that both the incidence of cancer and its treatment options keep steadily increasing?"
By deliberately focusing on such profitable "treatment" instead of on eliminating causes of this largely man-made disease, the "war on cancer" fraudulently conceals its true nature as a ruthless, for-profit enterprise. Not even Mark Twain could have dreamed up a more lucrative or more vicious con.
"Those of us who indict past failures have a duty to develop new solutions," Davis concludes, offering tentative ideas for a truth and reconciliation commission (funded by excess profit fees on industries that profit from cancer-causing behavior), medical surveillance programs for potentially exposed people, and far better recognition in the courts of the limits of science. Hopefully, her Secret History will inspire many more solutions, and the guts to implement some of them.
The World Without Us
by Alan Weisman, 2007. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, $24.95 hardcover.
by Carol Van Strum
Who will watch the home place,
Who will tend my heart's dear space?
Who will fill my empty place
When I am gone from here?
-- Kate Long
-- sung by Laurie Lewis, Rounder Records, 1994
"Look around you at today's world. Your house, your city. The surrounding land, the pavement underneath, and the soil hidden below that. Leave it all in place, but extract the human beings. Wipe us out, and see what's left. How would the rest of nature respond if it were suddenly relieved of the relentless pressures we heap on it and our fellow organisms?"
That provocative question begins an adventure for the wildest imaginings. To answer it, Alan Weisman traveled the globe, looking for remnants of the world before the first human chipped a tool, tantalizing hints of what the rest would become without us. Everywhere he seeks out and asks an eclectic range of experts – engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, zoologists, religious leaders, and paleontologists – to "picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow."
The enthusiasm these experts devote to their answers is a surprise, and a bit unnerving. Paul Schuber, a New York City subway superintendent, almost gleefully describes the first hours after humans vanish from the switches. If it's raining, he says, the whole system would be flooded in half an hour; this would take only a few days if it weren't raining. "At that point, water would start sluicing away soil under the pavement. Before long, streets start to crater. With no one unclogging sewers, some new watercourses form on the surface. Others appear suddenly as waterlogged subway ceilings collapse…."
That is just the beginning. Water, freezing and thawing, explodes pipes and cracks concrete in buildings, roadways, bridges, upon which a glorious succession of plants and trees rapidly colonize every fissure and dusty surface. During the centuries that New York's bridges continue to stand, wolves, coyotes, bear, and deer will find convenient trails across their weedy, cracked surfaces. Over millennia, soil deposits will bury our industrial toxins and metals deeper and deeper, to be compressed by returning and receding glaciers. In some far-off time, Weisman says, "buried in the moraine and eventually in geologic layers below will be an unnatural concentration of a reddish metal, which briefly had assumed the form of wiring and plumbing….The next toolmaker to arrive or evolve on this planet might discover and use it, but by then there would be nothing to indicate that it was us who put it there."
Our most lasting – or everlasting – legacy turns out to be not our architecture or technology, but our waste. In the tropical Pacific ocean, Weisman views a ten-million-square mile gyre of swirling, floating plastic garbage – cups, bottle caps, fish line, fish net, polystyrene packaging, six-pack rings, spent balloons, sandwich wrap, countless plastic bags and quadrillions of tiny plastic bits, many trapped inside jelly-fish and other creatures at the bottom of the marine food chain. These bits, he discovers, are magnets for PCBs slowly leaking into the oceans and thanks to their plastic carriers magnified up to a million times in the bodies of puffins and other sea birds. Plastic will remain in the planetary environment for thousands or even millions of years after we're gone, wreaking havoc on future life forms until some sturdy microbe evolves that can break it down.
What life forms will actually survive and evolve after we are gone is impossible to predict, Weisman notes, because our legacy of radioactive and toxic materials will last essentially forever. Were we to vanish tomorrow, the cooling ponds of 441 nuclear plants around the world would dry or drain, their reactor cores would melt and burn, and the resultant radioactive dust and vapor be distributed throughout the atmosphere – hundreds of Chernobyls, including Chernobyl itself. Wildlife struggling to adapt to vast surges of radioactivity will also be coping with poisons such as PCBs and dioxins that "may remain until the end of life itself."
In short, not a pretty picture. Were we to vanish tomorrow, we would certainly not leave the world better for our having been here.
Is there any way to reverse this picture? Amid pie-in-the-sky alternatives to the bleak end-time already looming, Weisman finds only one to be feasible: "prove that intelligence really makes us special after all….It would be poignant and distressing in ways, but not fatal. It would limit every human female on earth capable of bearing children to one." Within fifty years, he points out, "life on Earth for all species would change dramatically," and in a century we could continue to enjoy the blessings of our knowledge without being a scourge upon the planet or extinguishing ourselves.
The World Without Us, Weisman says, is "a fantasy in which we supposedly no longer exist, yet somehow we get to watch what unfolds next. Watch, and maybe learn."
There's no maybe about it. Any alternative is unthinkable.
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