By Brian Carnell

Thursday, January 3, 2002

Bjorn Lomborg recently set off a firestorm of controversy with his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist which, according to its publisher's hype, "challenges widely held beliefs that the environmental situation is getting worse and worse."

I have not read Lomborg's book, but it apparently is going to be the subject of not one, but several negative reviews in an upcoming issue of Scientific American (which seems a bit odd -- does SciAm even go that all out against creationist books?)

Anyway, I was going back and forth between web sites attacking and defending Lomborg, when I ran across an appeal to authority on behalf of Scientific American. Given SciAm's prestige, they would not print negative reviews of Lomborg's book unless there was really something wrong with it.

I am very skeptical of anything that Scientific American publishes on controversial issues after it gave a platform to animal rights activists Neal Barnard and Stephen Kaufman in the February 1997 issue. The article was so bad, SciAm even presented false credentials for Barnard.

At the end of the article, SciAm claimed that, "Barnard conducts nutrition research..." In fact Barnard is a psychiatrist who has no experience at all in nutrition science. When Frederick Goodwin pointed this out in a letter to the magazine, the editors lamely replied that since Barnard had published articles and books on nutritional issues, this warranted calling him a "nutrition researcher."

Hey, I've written some articles about computer technology -- it turns out I am a computer researcher!

The article itself by Barnard and Kaufman is filled with distortions and outright lies about the history of medical discoveries and the role that animal research played. For example, Barnard and Kaufman claimed that,

Animal experimenters have also asserted that animal tests could have predicted the birth defects caused by the drug thalidomide. Yet most animal species used in laboratories do not develop the kind of limb defects seen in humans after thalidomide exposure; only rabbits and some primates do.

This is a classic example of an animal rights half-truth. They forget to mention that thalidomide creates obvious congenital birth defects -- though not limb defects -- in rats, mice, hamsters. Thalidomide was never tested on pregnant animals because it was believed that drug compounds did not cross the placenta. If it were introduced today, it would never pass animal tests designed to screen for the potential to cause birth defects.

Similarly, Barnard and Kaufman claim that animal research was not necessary to discover insulin because researchers knew in the 19th century that diabetes was caused by pancreatic failure. But they forget to mention that only through extensive animal research did scientists discover that the production of insulin was what made the pancreas so important.

All of this published and given the stamp of approval by the supposedly authoritative Scientific American. You'll have to excuse me, then, if I'm not impressed by the magazine's fealty to truth and accuracy.

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