Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

What happens when ideas presented as science lead us in the wrong direction?

History is filled with brilliant ideas that gave rise to disaster, and this book explores the most fascinating—and significant—missteps: from opium's heyday as the pain reliever of choice to recognition of opioids as a major cause of death in the U.S.; from the rise of trans fats as the golden ingredient for tastier, cheaper food to the heart disease epidemic that followed; and from the cries to ban DDT for the sake of the environment to an epidemic-level rise in world malaria.

These are today's sins of science—as deplorable as mistaken past ideas about advocating racial purity or using lobotomies as a cure for mental illness. These unwitting errors add up to seven lessons both cautionary and profound, narrated by renowned author and speaker Paul A. Offit. Offit uses these lessons to investigate how we can separate good science from bad, using some of today's most controversial creations—e-cigarettes, GMOs, drug treatments for ADHD—as case studies. For every "Aha!" moment that should have been an "Oh no," this book is an engrossing account of how science has been misused disastrously—and how we can learn to use its power for good.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History, Audiobook, Medicine, Medical, Health

288 pages, Hardcover

First published April 4, 2017

About the author

Paul A. Offit, MD is the Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr. Offit is also the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology, and a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He is a recipient of many awards including the J. Edmund Bradley Prize for Excellence in Pediatrics bestowed by the University of Maryland Medical School, the Young Investigator Award in Vaccine Development from the Infectious Disease Society of America, and a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Paul A. Offit has published more than 130 papers in medical and scientific journals in the areas of rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety. He is also the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq, recently recommended for universal use in infants by the CDC; for this achievement Dr. Offit received the Gold Medal from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Jonas Salk Medal from the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology.

Dr Paul Offit was also a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is the author of multiple books.

from www.paul-offit.com

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've finished the book. It's really brilliant and very thought-provoking. I don't usually write summaries, but for this one I will because it is so interesting and so few people read in this genre. Eugenic is the most personally chilling to me.

1. Opium the first and best painkiller discovered by the Sumerians around 6,000 years ago. They obviously had no problems with it as a recreational drug either, naming it hul gil plant of joy. And therein lies its problems. Opiods have caused wars (the Opium Wars in China) and massive misery, as they continue to today from the illegal heroin to the legal Oxycontin.

2. Margarine promoted as the 'healthy alternative to butter'.It wasn't quite that full of saturated fats and partially hydrogenated oils containing transfats as it was. Even when it's contribution to the ever-rising heart disease problem in the West was known, the information was suppressed (much like the cancer-causing issues of cigarettes) because it sold so well and made manufacturers so much money and the government got so much tax revenue.

3. Nitrogen. With only naturally occuring nitrogen as a fertilizer, most of the world would have starved to death With nitrogen, we all get to eat and the waterways of the world are poisoned by acid rain and the overgrowth of algae that starve the waters of oxygen with all that means for the creatures that live in them or feed on them. Not only that but isolating nitrogen brought forth many evil gases and bombs,
and eventually Timothy McVeigh.

4. Eugenics It started with Mendel and his peas, was refined by Galton (cousin of Darwin), crossed the pond to be enthusiastically promoted by Charles Davenport, Margaret Sanger pushed it along with birth control, President Roosevelt and George Bernard Shaw thought the world could be improved by denying those they judged as lesser humans - whether by intelligence, physical disabilities (even the deaf), race or anything else they didn't like about a group - the right to have children. But it reached its absolute apogee with the 'scientific research' of Josef Mengele at Auschwitz.

" He infected children with typhus and tuberculosis to determine their susceptibilities to disease and performed mismatched blood transfusions to see what would happen. Mengele gave children electric shocks to see how much pain they could endure. He burned 300 children alive in an open fire. When children had heterochromatic eyes, he killed them and sent their eyes to Verschuer in packages marked, WAR MATERIALS: URGENT.

Mengele asked one mother to tape up her breasts to see how long her newborn could survive without food. He dissected a one-year-old while the child was still alive. When the nightmare finally ended, fewer than 200 of the 3,000 children put into Mengele’s care survived.

And not a single piece of recognizable information was obtained. Josef Mengele and Adolf Hitler showed exactly what could happen when eugenics was put into the hands of narcissistic sadists with absolute power."

When I was 17 and sharing a flat in Jerusalem, our landlady, an old lady, used to go through our letters and diaries and we didn't know what to say. She had a huge hairy patch just below her neck on her back which had been cut off her scalp and transplanted when she was just a tiny little girl. How could we say anything to her when she had been through that? So we got another flat.

5. Lobotomies. Dr. Egaz Moniz won a Nobel Prize in 1949 with his cure for mental illness. Walter Freeman popularised it with his fast, "non-surgical" ice pick through the eye socket and into the brain treatment. Enough said.

6. DDT Rachel Carson, with her phenomenally popular and influential book Silent Spring got DDT banned. She was a polemicist "rather than the scientist she claimed to be andwilling to stretch the truth to fit her bias." The Environmental Defense Fund wanted people to hear how evil DDT was so they commissioned a research survey which reported after 8 months that DDT was not a cancer causing agent, nor teratogenic and does not have deletrious effects on fish or other wildlife. William Ruckleshaus of the new offshoot Environmental Protection Agency didn't like these results so he didn't attend the hearing and pressed on regardless. DDT remains to this day the most effective control of malaria-bearing mosquitos but is banned everywhere. How many people, especially children with no resistance, have died because of this ban? What Carson forgot or chose to not mention was what Paracelsus said in the early 16thC "All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.'

7. Vitamin C. Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize twice, once for chemistry and once for peace. He was without doubt a polymath, not a genius who guessed but one who worked from an immense amount of research. Shame he didn't stick to that vitamin C. He said it would cure cancer (if the person hadn't had chemotherapy) and the common cold. His schtick became vitamins but none of his findings could be duplicated by his peers.

When Arthur Robinson proved conclusively that mega doses of vitamin C in fact caused cancer, Pauling went ballistic and had Robinson fired from the university. But research by others also showed that mega doses of vitamins actually caused cancer. A survey of 18,000 people using megavitamins had to be stopped early when there were huge increases in the numbers of people with lung cancer and heart disease. Pauling's error was not to apply the same rigorous research methods he did in science to nutrition and assumed that vitamins created in the lab were the same as those occurring in foods. Be warned. Don't fall for marketing hype, an apple a day really is better for you.

8. E-cigarettes. The American Cancer Society, Lung Association and CDC all oppose e-cigarettes on the grounds that they were a precusor to smoking real cigarettes. This despite the fact that cigarette smoking was at an all time low when the sales of e-cigarettes were high. In states that banned e-cigarettes, young people smoked more cigarettes, in states where it was legal, much less. Research in the UK concluded that it is easier to give up smoking by using e-cigarettes than nicotine patches. Nicotine doen't kill, it's the tar that does and that's not present in e-cigarettes.

There were a lot more examples of science gone wrong in this book, I don't know why the author said there were just seven, and scientists who definitely went wrong, often for their own greater glory, lack of research or financial rewards. It is a 5 star book, a gold five star book and an enjoyable as well as enlightening read.

Notes on reading the book Brilliant. Exposes the scientific biases most of us hold despite proven evidence to the contrary. An example. Vitamin C has no effect on colds. In mega doses it does not cause cancer to regress, but is a precusor of stomach cancer. Genetically modified food is what we have been doing since the dawn of time. In recent times hybrid seeds (F1) are genetically modified but don't carry the label so that's all right then! Introducing, just for example, fish genes into tomatoes isn't a problem. Fish share 70% of our genese and we often them with tomatoes. Genetically combining them doesn't make them evil!

Lots more. I must write a review of this book because i thought I was pragmatic and followed science rather than popular culture. Turns out that i have the usual prejudices against DDT, BPA and saccharine. I think it's time to read Scientific American or Popular Science (or similar) and give up the Daily Rag aka Daily Mail.

[Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤ · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the most part, I really enjoyed this book. However, there is one negative for me and it is a big one, knocking this off the 5 star shelf down to 4. I'll get the reason for it out of the way first, and then let you know why I mostly loved it.

The title is misleading. Maybe that doesn't sound like enough of a reason to warrant chipping off an entire star from the rating, but here's why: When a large portion of the American public distrusts science and the scientific process, saying the book is about SCIENCE gone wrong is just not a good thing. It's not SCIENCE that is wrong. It is people taking scientific results and either manipulating them to suit their own purposes, or jumping the gun and not collecting enough data before implementing something. It's not a "sin of science"; it's human beings' ignorance or manipulation of the facts. The "sins" in this book were almost always done by people who were not themselves scientists, and it was BECAUSE they didn't follow the scientific process that they went so horribly wrong. The scientific process is our best way to know and understand ourselves and the world. To imply that science is to blame for man's stupidity is a huge disservice to humanity, especially when people distrust it anyway, thinking the opinion of some 30 year old guy living in his mommy's basement venting BS on Facebook is just as valid as that of an esteemed scientist. Many Americans (and certainly some people in other countries as well) believe the world is 6,000 years old, human beings rode around on dinosaurs, a great flood covering the entire earth is how the Grand Canyon was "created", evolution is untrue, vaccines cause autism, climate change is a conspiracy, etc. etc. etc. So that's why I have such a major beef with the title of this book, and the author's or publisher's decision to add a subtitle that seems to assert that the problems discussed in the book are the fault of science. Not true.

OK, glad to get that off my chest! Despite all of that, this book was still a lot of fun to read. I learned a lot, and for me, that is what is most important about a book. My brain is a fact junkie; I get a sort of high, a jolt of major feel-goodedness when I learn something new.

Paul Offit discusses seven cases where people have misused science, either because they didn't wait for enough data to be collected, or because they simply ignored it. For instance, in the pursuit of a non-addictive and safe pain reliever, pharmaceutical companies kept marketing ever more addicting opioid products, claiming they were safe. In 1898 one needed a prescription for aspirin, but heroin was sold over the counter as a panacea, treating everything from tuberculosis to headaches! Eventually, they would create Oxycontin, the most addictive of all opioids/opiates so far, leading to the current heroin addiction crisis now plaguing cities and towns across America and is now the leading cause of accidental death in more than 30 states.

Another chapter deals with mental health treatments that did more harm than good, such as various shock "therapies" and lobotomies. There was no scientific data showing that lobotomies were safe, and yet Drs. Egas Moniz and Almeida Lima, "without performing a single experiment on an animal and spending only an afternoon practicing the procedure on a cadaver—had picked their first patient." More than 20,000 people would have parts of their brains chopped out over the coming decades.

Another sort of "snake oil" treatment that people still follow today was begun by one man's claims that since vitamins found in food are beneficial for us, large quantities of them in supplemental form would be even better, prolonging lives even. Instead, we now know that large doses of supplemental vitamins are harmful for us and are more likely to cause cancer than prevent it. I am glad to have my own misassumption about Vitamin C set straight; along with untold others, I believed that taking a large amount of Vitamin C in supplement form could prevent a cold from coming on, or make its duration shorter if I caught it. This is untrue; it has no effect at all. It is much better to get your Vitamin C from food; an example is the apple, half of which "has the antioxidant activity of 1,500 milligrams of vitamin C, even though it contains only 5.7 milligrams of the vitamin"... and doesn't cause liver damage or heart disease!

Paul Offit also discusses things like cancer screenings, of which many (not all) are now being reevaluated for their usefulness. He discusses vaccines, BPA, DDT, and GMOs, telling how myths have arisen and spread about them. The false claims that were made about these and other products still persist and sometimes cause even more suffering from not utilizing them. For instance, "GMO technology has reduced chemical pesticide use by 37 percent [and] increased crop yields by 22 percent" yet many people believe they are harmful in and of themselves, even though humans have been genetically modifying our crops and animals through selective or artificial breeding for thousands of years.

There are many interesting things talked about in this book, many myths debunked. I highly recommend this book, especially to those who look at the title and go, "SEE! I told you you can't trust them satan-loving scientists! Science is bad, bad, bad and to prove it to you, I'll put it on Facebook with my new iPhone, because THAT! THAT makes it true!".

“The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it’s that they know so many things that just aren’t so.” ~Mark Twain

[Mario the lone bookwolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seven examples to learn from how not do give many inspirations of how humankind could mess things up in the future. DDT, transfats, E-cigarettes, eugenics, vitamin C, nitrogen, lobotomy, etc all seemed fair for its days but stupid to barbaric in hindsight.

One must say, to humankind's defense, that some of the mistakes couldn´t be foreseen and that good intention had a bad outcome nobody can be blamed for, especially regarding the right balance between the overuse or ban of DDT or how to have a healthy diet. In other cases, at least a bit of common sense or less corruption could have helped in preventing small to large scale catastrophes, but faith and big money did their thing and it escalated quickly. What is there to learn for the future from all of this?

As horrible as some of the results of science gone wrong may seem, as tiny and unimportant they may be in retrospective because with the further development of technology the potential for the ultimate, earth-shattering, all-destroying mega fail comes closer. We just played around with some environment, animals, chemicals, our health and bodies, nuclear bombs, but still nothing like an ultimate pandemic or other man-made catastrophes like green/grey goo, runaway greenhouse effects, conscious AIs, poisoning, mutating, sterilizing or maddening humanity, habitat loss, etc..

Even those scary dangers are nothing, because they still stay humanmade and limited to a certain area or planet (except of grey goo of course) and don´t play with elemental forces. But manipulating physics may be the greatest lunacy, because already with the nuclear bomb they didn´t know when and if the chain reaction will stop and simply did it. It´s simple good or bad luck that will determine if we will find an ultimate energy source, technology or knowledge or destroy ourselves while tinkering with it.

Of course, there always stays the option to get genocidal without any reason, perverting high or low technology by just using our wetware in inventing new stupid ideologies as reasons to hate and kill each other, like for instance in future between genetic enhanced and normal people, cyborgs and normal people, normal people vs normal people because of any of the many stupid reasons seen in history or by adapting them, etc.

A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...

[Mompkin · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is by far the longest review I’ve ever written, but I feel like it is my responsibility, as a scientist interested in education, to fully express the degree to which this book is problematic and misleading. The premise of Pandora’s lab is to discuss ‘surprising’ examples of ‘science gone bad.’ There are many issues with this, but one of the biggest is that if you have read other science books or listened to pretty much any podcast, you will already be familiar with most of these stories, told in a better and more interesting way. Most of the time in the book, I was already familiar with these particular science stories -many of them have already been covered by earlier books, and in more interesting detail. So, these stories aren't new. If you're going to re-tread ground already covered by earlier authors, you need your material to cover it in a new and different way. If I write a biography of George Washington, the first thing anyone will do is compare my biography to other biographies which have already been written. If a book just re-treads existing material, it has to add something new to the mix in some other way. Unfortunately, it does not. Most of these stories are told better elsewhere. Add to this the fact that the writing is an unfortunate combination of perfunctory and polemical styles, and one quickly comes to the conclusion that a reader would be much better off finding other, much better written books than this one.
A second problematic component is that the book is, more often than not, discussing stances and opinions held by people in spite of, not because of, the general scientific consensus. It’s unclear, for most of the stories, how the bad which emerges has anything to do with science. It generally takes the stance that society should base decisions on science, not whackadoodle unfounded claims unbacked by most scientists. This really has nothing to do with science going bad, it has to do with collective groups of people making ill-fated decisions in spite of the scientific evidence. The tagline of the book is fundamentally misleading, but this is not its only sin.
The book also makes the dangerously naïve argument that data and facts exist objectively, outside of scientific paradigms and cultural frameworks, if only we look behind the curtain. This is not how science has ever worked or will ever work in the future. There is no such thing as objective data collection or data analysis. There is no such thing as objective research, and it is not possible to objectively evaluate the value of a scientific theory, outside of any societal context. It is only possible to conduct science from within a scientist’s experiential framework, and all scientists are people who participate in society and exist in a culture. It is not possible to understand the mistakes of the past and learn how to avoid similar mistakes in the future using this ill-informed and nonsensical concept of ‘objective data.’ As Offit does not seem to realize this, the book simply cannot offer any useful insight. I would recommend that Offit read pretty much any book about the history or philosophy of science, to better understand how flawed one of the main messages of the book is.
In a rather ironic twist, given the premise of his book and his frequent declarations that ‘it’s all about the data,’ he has an entire chapter devoted to the poorly researched argument that the publication of Silent Spring directly led to hundreds of millions of people dying of malaria. This is inaccurate on many levels. First, while DDT was banned in the united states, it was not banned worldwide. It was not even fully banned in the united states – it was permitted for use in cases of public health, just not for agricultural purposes. In fact, the US still manufactures and exports DDT-laced mosquito nets as part of various aid programs. DDT has continued to be and still is used to control malaria-carrying mosquitos. The main reason why its use today has declined so much is that it is not particularly cost-effective anymore when used as a fogging agent, and countries which struggle with chronic malaria outbreaks generally have found that other approaches besides area fogging are cheaper and save more lives, and only makes sense when used in rotation with other pesticides to manage the problem of insecticide resistance.
In fact, even before the publication of Silent Spring, many health officials were concerned about rapid declines in the effectiveness of DDT, as mosquitos were quickly evolving resistance to it. Alarmed articles from the late 1950s and early 60s can be found which panic about how DDT is no longer effectively controlling malaria. Declines in the efficacy of DDT, along with the myopic behavior of reducing funding as soon as malaria cases dropped (only to balloon back up again without further preventative measures) explain why DDT use declined over time. In the late 1950’s, DDT use in the US had declined precipitously, with only 1/10th of the volume which was produced in 1950 being produced in 1960. But Silent Spring didn’t come out until 1962. Oops. How can one possibly make the argument that the book is single-handedly responsible for the decline in DDT use if it was already declining?
The arguments in this entire chapter are easy to refute, in part because the author just seems to have read the talking points from one of the many right-wing crank websites decrying Silent Spring. This is especially evident when looking at the sources for this chapter, which seem to be predominantly secondary sources (either nut-job books or blogs). Unfortunately, in re-using these commonly used arguments, the author should have maybe spent a bit more time doing research, as even the Wikipedia page on DDT has all the information necessary to refute the arguments made in this book. When a 5-minute read of a Wikipedia page demonstrates that an author doesn’t know what they are talking about, it’s hard to have faith in their ability to read and understand scientific literature. Ironic given the basis of the book, I know. The author raises good points about Carson over-reaching beyond the scope of the data and trumpeting sensationalist conclusions not based on meticulous science, but then he goes on to do exactly the same thing, only in the opposite direction. Moderately hilarious, except for how depressing it is.
This book also contains such revelations as “famous old people sometimes say dumb things, even when they’re scientists.” If you didn’t know this, then you have probably never read the news, or a nonfiction book. If this is indeed your first nonfiction book, boy are you in for a treat! There are lots of them, and most of them are better than this one!
I do have to admit that the chapter discussing Haber was interesting, as I knew much of the history surrounding the Haber-Bosch process, but I did not really know the full history of Haber as a scientist, and I enjoyed learning his complicated and tragic story.
More than anything, I’m confused as to how the stories in this book relate to concerns about science. Most of the examples are of how people will say and do things in spite of science, and how society as a whole often prefers to ignore inconvenient evidence. I’m not sure how bad things that happen because rigorous science was ignored are examples of ‘science gone wrong.’ It’s examples of people preferring convenient pseudoscience to complicated and nuanced rigorous science, and how, believe it or not, this can lead to ill-informed conclusions. As an example, Offit seems to attribute the entire supplement industry to Linus Pauling’s addled claims about vitamin C. This makes no sense, as since the beginning of time people have clamored to buy miracle quick fix tonics and supplements, never with any evidence to support their efficacy aside from the sensationalist claims of the hawkers, and often in direct contradiction of the general scientific consensus. This problem has nothing to do with ‘science gone wrong.’ Indeed, despite overwhelmingly universal scientific consensus that homeopathy makes no sense, it has been popular for over a hundred years. It is not an example of science gone wrong, but inexplicably Offit acts as if the ill-advised comment of one prominent scientist in support of it is the only reason why homeopathy exists. If it was popular before the comment, and continued to be popular after the comment, how can one possibly attribute its popularity to a single comment made far after its worldwide spread? Offit does not seem to understand that there are powerful psychological factors which play into the continued popularity of pseudo-science. He instead is under the simplistic impression that if you show people a pile of data and tell them they are dumb, they will change their perspective, despite reams of scientific evidence that this is now how human minds typically work. Thus, even his well-intentioned recommendations at the end of the book to be more data-literate and listen less to sensationalist pseudoscience in the news is not helpful, new, or insightful advice. I’m pretty sure this the 1,000,000th book to recommend that the general culture should be more attentive and nuanced when drawing conclusions about science. This advice is also not helpful, and research on science communication generally demonstrates that, when trying to educate the public using the style recommended by Offit in the book, not only is this communication style ineffective, but it often has the opposite effect, entrenching the opposing viewpoint in the listener even further.
So, overall, we have a not particularly well written book, recycling old material into an ineffective format, while also introducing some woefully inaccurate information, and which demonstrates the author’s fundamental misunderstanding of how both science and society work. I cannot possibly recommend this book to anyone. While the author may have thought he was performing a public service by writing this book, I fear it is at best harmless and at worst horrendously misleading.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a clear and concise manner, we are presented with seven examples of science that went badly wrong. From the effort to relieve pain, taking us from poppy plants and opium, to morphine, heroin and our current opiod crisis, Mendel's pea experiments to eugenics, and using lobotomies as a cure for autism. Science is debunked time and time again. We tend to believe what we hear, read from so called experts often with devastating consequences. The author, urges us time and time again to check the data for ourselves before we make decisions that may be in error or at the least exaggerated.

An extremely interesting and informative book that not only takes us back in history at times,but in the last chapter he covers some of our present debates, e cigs and BPA to name a few.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Original Review, June 26, 2022:

I have fretted over this review for hours. I’ve written it and edited it and scrapped it and rewritten it and re-edited it and scrapped it again. It’s not that the book is particularly horrible or spectacularly great or overly complicated. In fact, my inability to churn out one of my patently lackluster critiques has very little to do with Pandora’s Lab and almost everything to do with me.

If you were to write about the medical malpractice and corporate greed that led up to the current opioid epidemic [as Paul Offit has done here], I would be right there with you. If you were to expound on the mountains of dietary misinformation concerning heart disease and its relationship to cholesterol and saturated fats [ibid], I would be on your side. If you were to correlate the historical atrocities of eugenics with Donald Trump’s condemnation of Mexican and Muslim immigration [ibid], I would most definitely sing your praises while simultaneously applauding your courage. But, criticize Silent Spring, the storied polemic that sparked worldwide environmental activism, and I will (I’ve learned) take an inordinate amount of umbrage and assume a posture of defensive hostility.

As much as I might want to deny it, I still have heroes. In baseball it’s Jackie Robinson. In American history it’s Thomas Paine. In music it’s Joni Mitchell and Nina Simone (I couldn’t narrow it down to just one). And in environmentalism it’s Rachel Carson. Attack the credibility of one of my heroes and you better have your facts straight. I take it personally.

In Pandora’s Lab, Paul A. Offit launches a full frontal assault on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (ouch!). My knee jerk response was inordinately emotional and combative. The first review I wrote on Dr. Offit’s book was almost one thousand words, referenced five medical studies on the long term effects of pesticide DDT (and DDE) exposure, and was topped off with a vindictive rating of two stars. I just couldn’t bring myself, in good conscience, to post it. So, in the spirit of open-mindedness, I am willing to give Dr. Offit the benefit of doubt.

*This is me struggling desperately to practice what I preach and not draw conclusions without all the facts… BUT, I reserve the right to edit this review after I have (critically) read Carson’s book. For now, [26 June 2022] Pandora’s Lab gets four (tentative) stars.
__________________________________________

Update February 15, 2023

After reading Rachel Carson’s book and some associated studies I find myself questioning Offit’s reasoning concerning Silent Spring and its scientific value. I still have some further research to do, but for now I’m reducing my rating of Pandora’s Lab to three (tentative) stars.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Yun · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pandora's Lab examines seven scientific breakthroughs that ultimately lead us in the wrong direction, and considers what lessons we might learn from them so that we don't make the same mistakes again.

On the one hand, this is a fascinating and thought-provoking book. One of the highlights for me was the chapter about opioid addiction. Offit manages to succinctly describe the history of this class of drugs, starting from the opium poppy plant to its recent chemical formulations that have led to a staggering addiction crisis. This chapter puts into perspective and helped me understand this drug, its allure, addictive properties, and chemical evolution in a way that multiple standalone books in the past have not done.

Another chapter I really enjoyed is the one on margarine. I appreciated Offit's straightforward, scientific writing and the way he broke down the differences between the fats. In particular, he made it easy to understand what is so special and dangerous about trans fat, and what to watch out for when grocery shopping.

In general, I found most of the seven stories to be insightful, but the chapter on DDT was a huge exception. Offit argues that Rachel Carson, through her book Silent Spring, called forth a revolution against DDT that led to its eventual ban in the US and around the world. He harps on the fact that this anti-DDT movement was not backed at all by science. This surprised me, so I looked into it, and every article I found of reputable origin agrees that DDT does harm humans and animals, acting as an endocrine disruptor and thinning the eggshells of birds. The author didn't mention any of this, and it's clear he cherry-picked the data he included so that it supports his narrative. This chapter reads more like Offit's personal rant instead of the calm, scientific exploration it should have been.

Another part of the book that disappointed me was the epilogue. In it, the author attempts to argue that e-cigarettes are not harmful because they don't cause cancer as traditional cigarettes do (since they don't have tar). I'm really surprised to read that a scientist would take such a narrow point of view on what's considered harmful, especially when he should have known that nicotine addiction is a huge issue and should not be brushed aside so lightly.

Overall, this book is a mixed bag. There are some extremely informative and thought-provoking passages in here, and I learned a lot from reading this book. But at times, Offit commits the same sin he is writing about, where he lets his scientific expertise cloud his judgement and presents his personal views instead of what the data and science really shows.

[Tania · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Let me start of by saying that I'm not a big nonfiction reader, so the fact that I'm giving this almost five stars definitely says something about how accessible and interesting the content is.

The author looks at different inventions, most of them well intentioned, which had unforeseen, detrimental sometimes even disastrous consequences. It reads like a who's who of Nobel prize winners. Although the discoveries and consequences are interesting enough, the author provides us with:
-thought-provoking facts (as rates of immigration have increased rates of crime have decreased),
-wonderful tidbits (because the principal distributors of heroin in the 1920's were three Jewish mobsters, heroin was often called "smack", from the Yiddish word for schmecher, meaning "addict"),
-beautiful quotes ("Harmony among peoples come from the true principles and attitudes of the present, not from purging the past.") and
- the lessons we should learn from mistakes made in the seven examples. I personally think the one lesson we, as consumers, should heed is Beware the Quick Fix. We're so used to getting everything right now, and this makes impatient for an easy solution

If you enjoyed Freakanomics you will love this. In fact even if you've never tried anything similar before, this is a good place to start. It was entertaining, thought-provoking and well-written.

Sonja, thanks so much for gently insisting that I read this.

[Beverly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye-widening, well-told tales of science gone wrong, Pandora's box is not a harangue against science. I hate the war on science that is going on in the United States right now.This isn't that; it's a treatise on what goes wrong when "mostly" well meaning people promote pseudoscience to either make money, become famous, or out of willful ignorance.
The most horrific and poignant stories to me were the ones about forced sterilization and lobotomy that took place in the United States. Forced sterilization took place in America so that we could hold on to our "superior Nordic genes". The proponents of this movement first legislated to have less immigrants with bad genes into the U.S., but soon they were not content with keeping the bad blood out, they decided to tackle the problem from within by sterilizing , . . . '"the poor, syphilitic, feebleminded, insane, alcoholic, deformed, lawbreaking, or epileptic Americans in 32 states. . ." All together over 65,000 citizens were sterilized, many without consent or knowledge of what was being done to them. This Eugenics program soon spread to other countries and was taken up enthusiastically by Germany and led directly to the Holocaust.
The story of lobotomy is also a dark blot on American history. This movement was primarily the work of one man, Walter Freeman, a doctor with no surgical training. At first, he teamed with a brain surgeon to perform this technique of boring a hole in the brain and removing tissue, but later developed something called the ice pick lobotomy in which he drove an ice pick into the person's eye socket, then hit it with a mallet and wiggled the ice pick around and proceeded to do the same thing in the other eye, all without anesthesia and without wearing gloves or a mask. Most patients were women and did not want it. From 1936 until 1951, Freeman and his trainees preformed 18,000 lobotomies. Freeman became discredited and lost his medical degree eventually, but not before people were killed from the "surgery" or were left completely unable to function afterwards. He also operated on little children, one boy was only four.
Offit, the author, leaves us with some hope, like Pandora, that these types of things can be avoided in future, but it is up to us to be careful and look to rigorous, scientific studies and not to rely on hearsay or the internet or the current zeitgeist.

[Sonja Arlow · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 fantastic stars

“History is the error we are forever correcting.” —Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno”

From the noble fight to ease patient pain came destructive and highly addictive substances like morphine, heroine and OxyCotin.

From the desire to create more food for the world sprouted biological warfare and WW 2 gas chambers.

The humble study of genetic traits in peas gave birth to the USA eugenics program. In fact, this chapter succinctly outlines the fertile ground out of which Adolf Hitler’s beliefs grew.

There are many varied scientific discoveries dissected. From the invention of lobotomies, the megavitamin industry, the AIDS/HIV denial debacle that killed hundreds of thousands of people in SA and across the world (I am referring to you Thabo Mbeki), to the hype around e-cigarettes. Even them crazy scientologists get a turn with their claim that autism is caused by worms.

Our history is riddled with scientific breakthroughs but also scientific disasters. The main theme with most of the scientist in this book, which include Nobel Prize winners, is that they just never thought that they could be wrong. About anything. Ever.

“Every claim, independent of a scientist’s reputation, should stand on a mountain of evidence”

“There is a fine line between genius and madness”

The last 1/3 reminded me of Bad Science but unlike Bad Science there are no long sections explaining research methodologies ad nauseum. The writing is very accessible and easy to grasp.

The author also makes extremely compelling (and controversial) arguments against the overuse of certain cancer screenings, using apt analogies so anyone can understand the science-speak.

This is not a book to read just to get funny dinnertime anecdotes. There are some real lessons to learn from our past mistakes. The thing I appreciated the most is that the author did not just slam down the perceived villains of the stories. When applicable he also outlined the astounding contributions these same mad scientists made to mankind.

HIGHLY recommended.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an excellent book and not much to argue against or surprise, who's not against poison gas, heroin or lobotomy. But for me the most surprising chapter was on Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. I don't believe going into this book that anyone could convince me, a vegetarian, organic crop lover that DDT might be a good thing, but Offit actually did and that alone makes the book worth reading.

[Margarita Garova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Веднъж отворим ли кутията на Пандора, няма връщане назад. Бедата е пусната по широкия свят под формата на универсален цяр, за който се твърди, че може да реши световни проблеми като глад и болести. Но когато нещо е твърде хубаво, за да е истина, предпочитаме хубавото пред истината.

Някъде по средата между сляпото преклонение пред научния прогрес и пълното му отричане се намира “Лабораторията на Пандора: седем истории, в които науката сбърка” (извинявам се за лаишкия превод, но книгата не е издадена на български все още).

За някои гафове на науката вече няма никакво съмнение относно катастрофалния им характер – лоботомията, хидрогенизираните мазнини, безконтролното предписване на опиума и неговите деривати като лекарство, предозирането с витамини и добавки и теорията за расовата чистота – евгениката. Зад всяка една от тези умишлени или неволни заблуди стои по някое голямо име в науката, а останалите просто мултиплицираме ефекта с нашата склонност към “quick fixes” – бързи и лесни решения на сложн�� проблеми.

Пол Офит ни напомня, че стане ли дума за наука, не е никак лесно да се отсее автентичното от псевдото, комерсиалния интерес от реалните ползи за човечеството. Първо, защото обществото в масовия случай и поради обясними причини няма как да е коректив на сбъркалия учен. Второ, масовизирането на информацията ни дава фалшивата увереност, че с две-три статии ставаме специалисти по тема, на която хората посвещават цяла научна кариера. На следващо място, паралелното съществуване на псевдонаучни течения, които допълнително замъгляват картината. Не бива да забравяме и фактора “авторитет” при твърдения, идващи от хора с бели престилки, особено когато имат по един-два Нобела в актива си.

Много е вероятно да ви учуди поне една от седемте истории в тази книга. Аз лично бях втрещена, че пълната забрана на пестицида ДДТ, вместо дозираното му използване, всъщност е нанесло повече вреди, особено в райони, където върлува малария.

За мен най-добре представена обаче беше историята на немския химик Фриц Хабер, който пръв синтезира амониевата селитра, буквално спасявайки все по-увеличаващото се човечеството от глад. Това е същият пламенен патриот обаче, отговорен за използването на иприт пред Първата световна война (за което никак не е съжалил). Съдбата на Хабер е много показателна за онези времена – след като родината му пада под нацистка диктатура, еврейският учен е натирен в изгнание.

Историите в “Лабораторията на Пандора” са шарени като проявите на човешката глупост. Изглеждат произволни, но ги обединява общото предупреждение спрямо безкритичното приемане на сензации. Защото колективната цена за индивидуални грешки може да е твърде висока.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book relates seven primary examples of where scientific discoveries were either deliberately or accidentally misinterpreted, leading to disasters. The title is a bit of a misnomer. It is not so much “science gone wrong” as people misunderstanding science or using it in inappropriate ways.

The author combines scientific information and history, providing examples of where science was used as a justification for doing some horrible things (e.g., eugenics, used in Hitler’s genocidal policies) or instances of acting on anecdotal evidence rather than going through the scientific process (e.g., lobotomies, which were never tested for safety). Often times, the people “leading the charge” were out to enhance their own image or were completely unqualified.

The final chapter cites important lessons we can learn from our historic mistakes. There are relevant lessons for today’s world, especially as we continue to battle the pandemic, and this chapter alone is worth reading. Those interested in the intersection of history and science will find this book engrossing.

“Science stands on two pillars: one more reliable than the other. The first pillar is peer review; before a paper is published, experts in the field review it. The process, unfortunately, is flawed. Not all experts are equal and sometimes bad data slip through. The second pillar saves the day: reproducibility…. Truths emerge when studies performed by different scientists working in different environments using different methods find similar results. Ignoring these truths can have disastrous consequences.”

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an amazing educational resource! Offit writes in a no-nonsense, yet highly engaging way. I learned a lot from this and have already recommended it to two people. He provides great histories, strong data, and wraps up the "seven stories" with great rules about spotting fakes and charlatans.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is great overall, but the title & description are terrible. Science only went wrong in one case & that's psychiatry, a very soft science even today. Back then, it was pretty much a pseudoscience. Instead, society has cherry-picked & misused what science has discovered. I just don't see that as a failing of science & certainly not "sins of science" (quote from the book's description). Most of the chapter titles are mine, not his, to lend clarity.

I have some real issues with some of his points & made them in the details below, but otherwise I highly recommend this book in any format. As an audiobook, it was very easy to listen to. I did get a copy of the ebook, but basically only referred to it for the review & to double check on some of the points I disagree with - mostly those surround Carson & DDT.

Chapter 1 - Opiates: The use of opium predates written records for pain & other ailments. Attempts to make it less addictive have only made it more so due to a poor understanding of addiction & addicts. I'd hardly call the various mass addictions a failure of science, though. Scientists set out to change it & did. Instead of subjecting the fruits of their labor to any sort of scrutiny, companies & governments just used it until the crisis was too bad to ignore any more. It's basically the failing of greed on the part of addicts & their greedy providers: doctors, pharma, & the various governments.

Chapter 2 - Transfats: Again, not a failing of science, but public figures pushing unsubstantiated claims. He especially takes the McGovern Dietary Committee to task for this correctly, but they weren't the only ones. Dietary practices as dictated by the government & popular opinion have always had a poor record. Follow the money. It's too similar to the story of Fletcher & his chewing food to a liquid way back in the early 1900s.

Chapter 3 - Haber: Fritz Haber figured out how to fix nitrogen from a gas into ammonia thus creating the basis for modern fertilizers & explosives. I don't see how this can be a failing of science - it simply provided a power tool to humanity. If we want to act like a child with a chainsaw, that's on society, not the science behind the discovery. We couldn't feed folks today without artificially restoring nitrogen to the soil & too much can certainly cause issues as it runs off into waterways creating algae blooms which unbalance habitats. Explosives can be used for both good & bad purposes, too. Again, not science, but Haber's & society's use is at fault.

Chapter 4 - Eugenics: Offit does a good job tracing the science that led to the movement, the key public figures, & societal issues that pushed it along. He didn't mention the breed craze of the 19th century, but did well with immigration, Sanger, & others, especially Madison Grant one of the father's of the conservation movement & author of The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History, which Hitler called his bible. He ends especially well, warning against using pseudoscience to support the zeitgeist. Again, actual science was not at fault. Many pointed out the flaws, but they were ignored. This is all about society cherry picking to support what they wanted.

Chapter 5 - Lobotomies is finally a section where science does go wrong. There was no oversight by any of organizations that could & should have done something about this. They turned a blind eye to little & bad data. Psychiatric science is an extremely soft science at best, but scooping out pieces of brain & leaving people as mindless idiots (when it didn't kill them) certainly helped alleviate the problems in crowded in mental institutions. I was disappointed that Offit didn't address why these institutions were so crowded, though. Could it have been that the people in them didn't measure up to the Cleaver's?

Chapter 6 - "The Mosquito Liberation Front" I'm going to have to reread Silent Spring since its condemnation of DDT is what Offit says caused perhaps half a billion deaths due to not spraying for mosquitoes. I'm quite shocked at how loose Carson apparently played with the truth behind the effects of DDT. That's reprehensible, if true, & it probably is. However, Offit carefully avoids mentioning the effects it had on the rest of the environment & how they would have gotten worse over time as DDE (one component DDT breaks down into) built up in the ecosystem. In fact, he never mentions DDE at all. Instead he writes pretty much the way he accused Carson of writing - long on emotion, short of facts, although he disguises this with heart-wrenching statistics on child mortality.

Chapter 7 - "Nobel Prize Disease" is 3 great examples, starting with Linus Pauling, where the science showed scientists were wrong, but they traded on their earlier reputations. He also shows just how stupid & gullible not only people, but institutions, can be.

Chapter 8 - Summing up is worth reading even if you don't read the rest of the book. The excellent points he made throughout the book starting with 1. "It's all about the data." I don't think that he stressed how important it is not to rely on a single study & to make sure the data is reproducible. His next point was that 2. there's always a cost & his example is the overuse of antibiotics.

Another warning is to 3. "Beware the zeitgeist" in which he points out how bad the current popular opinion is on GMOs & 'chemicals', a subject that infuriates me on a regular basis. Also 4. Beware the quick fix, a point he made about lobotomies. His examples of parents trying to 'cure' autism are heartbreaking.

5. The dose makes the poison when coupled with mass hysteria from the above makes for really bad situations. Did Carson really create the 'zero tolerance' policy? I detest that.

6. Be cautious about being too cautious. has an instructional example in BPA, but his point on cancer screening was close to perfect. So much of it is crap & it does nothing but cause problems. Great example with the animals & burning barn.

7. Pay attention to the little man behind the curtain is the final point. Beware of people like Pauling when the evidence doesn't support them, especially if they attack with conspiracy theories. Wakefield is a prime example. ...As Norman Levitt, a mathematician and debunker of pseudoscience, famously said, “While Galileo was a rebel, not all rebels are Galileo”—no matter how hard they try to convince you that they are.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of non-fic stories of how scientists failed miserably while trying to make our world better and what we should be checking not to repeat these follies. I read it as a part of monthly reading for February 2022 at Non Fiction Book Club group.

There are eight stories plus an epilogue, which surprised me the most. The stories:

Chapter 1: God’s Own Medicine the opium, which was known for both its pain relief qualities and as an addictive substance since ancient times. There were several attempts to ‘clean it up’ so its anastatic qualities remain but no addiction established. Firstly, in 16th century a Swiss alchemist, physician, astrologer, and philosopher named Paracelsus mixed opium with brandy, calling his concoction laudanum and hoped that he solved the issue. Then, in In 1803, Friedrich Sertürner isolated opium’s most abundant and most active ingredient – morphium, and in 1853, a doctor Alexander Wood injected morphine directly into the bloodstream, making it the first intravenous drug. He (wrongly) assumed that if morphine were injected instead of ingested, people wouldn’t develop an “appetite” for the drug, so no addiction. In 1895, Bayer produced acetylated morphine, following is famous Aspirin made (again supposedly non-addictive) heroin. In 1900, Eli Lilly, working in collaboration with Bayer, began distributing heroin without prescription in the United States, promoting it side by side with aspirin as a treatment for colds and the flu. In the early 1950s scientists turned to another component of opium: thebaine. Called it oxycodone, commercial name OxyContin that OxyContin first came onto the market in 1996, and now is the most heavily used legal drug in the US.


Chapter 2: The Great Margarine Mistake “saturated” and “unsaturated” and “trans fats”, promoting vegetable oil based margarine over butter, but in reality increasing consumption of highly dangerous trans fats, leading to more hear diseases instead of less. Not only do trans fats dramatically increase low-density lipoprotein (vLDL, the worst kind of cholesterol), but they also dramatically decrease HDL, the helpful cholesterol. Public advocacy groups eventually regretted their role in inadvertently promoting unsaturated fats containing trans fats.

Chapter 3: Blood From Air nitrogen fertilizers sharply increased agricultural yields, but now can kill our oceans. Initially mined, but in 1909 Fritz Haber became the first person to discover a commercially feasible way to break N2 apart, getting Ammonia the base for ammonium nitrate, perfect as a synthetic fertilizer. During the WW1 he also made poison gas, which made him pariah among non-German scientist. However, his help to Germany hasn’t saved him, a baptized Jew, from Nazi despite his Nobel prize and other honors, so at the end of his life he turned into active Zionist.

Chapter 4: America’s Master Race Charles Davenport, an accredited member of America’s academic elite, who was also a proponent of eugenics, who backed an establishment of the Eugenics Record Office in 1910 to “Determine which Americans were of inferior stock and prevent them from marrying or having children.” Again backed (by wrongly understood) science. Madison Grant, who was the single most effective conservationist in America, who founded the Wildlife Conservation Society, singlehandedly saved the American bison from extinction, as well as devoted himself to saving whales, bald eagles, etc., wrote The Passing of the Great Race, (mentioned in The Great Gatsby), popularizing the concept of ‘Nordic’ race and its ‘contamination’ by Jews and other ‘inferiors’.

Chapter 5: Turning the Mind Inside Out a Portuguese neurologist named Egas Moniz, who won Nobel prize for his work, assumed that frontal lobe removal prevents the development of experimental neuroses and started a lobotomy as a cure for neurosis. Walter Freeman ‘improved’ the procedure introducing ‘ice pick’ method, blindly hitting frontal lobe thru patient’s nose!

Chapter 6: The Mosquito Liberation Front one case of not a scientist, winning against scientists and killing millions. Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, which became an international best seller, alerting the world to the dangers of pesticides, and led to the banning of DDT. There was no scientific evidence that DDT is harmful to either humans or animals, in the 1960s it saved 300 mn people by eliminating malaria. In India, between 1952 and 1962, DDT spraying caused a decrease in annual malaria cases from 100 million to 60,000. By the late 1970s, no longer able to use the pesticide, the number of cases increased to 6 million. Between 1941, before DDT, and 1960, after DDT had been used for at least a decade, 26 different kinds of birds had been counted. All had increased in number. In Silent Spring, Carson focused on specific instances where DDT had damaged starlings, robins, meadowlarks, and cardinals. But, at least according to the Christmas counts, populations of each of these birds had actually increased about fivefold.

Chapter 7: Nobel Prize Disease Linus Pauling, Nobel prize winner, who decided that super-dozes of vitamin С can save the world and bring eternal life, claiming that vitamin C also cured cancer. Linus Pauling had been so right for so long that he just couldn’t imagine that he could ever be wrong—even when he clearly was wrong.

Chapter 8: Learning From the Past this chapters summarizes why the follies have happened: bad data, fads, belief to authorities, searching for quick fix. It also can be considered a broader Epilogue to the book. while I was aware in general, but usually not that deeply about all the abovementioned follies in Chapters 1-7, this one lists new ones, which were totally unexpected for me, namely that e-cigarettes can be beneficial (the CDC reported that although the use of e-cigarettes had tripled between 2013 and 2014, the incidence of cigarette smoking had declined dramatically.) bisphenol A (BPA), a weak estrogen—about 40,000 times weaker than other synthetic estrogens. What researchers soon discovered, however, was that this weak hormone, although insoluble in water, could leach out of plastic or metal containers. They feared that Americans, including American babies, might unknowingly be ingesting a feminizing hormone. In 2011, a review of studies in people found no evidence that low doses of BPA caused harm. The reason that studies in rodents had found that BPA had caused problems was that the rodents had been injected with BPA; injection bypassed the liver, which typically inactivates BPA within five minutes. When rodents were fed BPA instead of being injected with it, those given 40, 400, or 4,000 times the typical human exposure remained healthy. Finally, the fact that screening for thyroid and breast cancers aren’t very helpful, but interventions can be life damaging

Overall a very interesting book, the other side of science.

[Viktor Stoyanov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Чудесен преглед на ужасяващо развили се "научни" творения. Истории за реалния "Франкенщайн" и най-вече за размисли и поуки за бъдещето.

Ще спомена повечето от историите, за да прецените сами, дали ще са ви интересни:

1. Опиум - Морфин - Хероин - и др. Всяка следваща дрога по-силна от предишната и създадена с идеята да "лекува", или да бъде по-безвреден заместител на предната. Сами се досещате колко грешно е било това схващане.
2. Евгеника, Мадисън Грант, Менгеле ... не ми се ще да описвам подробно, но тази псевдо наука завършила в ръцете на Менгеле е вероятно най-ужасното, което човек може да си представи.
3. Рейчъл Карсън - можете да чекнете в Гугъл повече за нея. Природозащитничка, чиято работа тук е описана балансирано - с всичките положителни и отрицателни влияния.
4. Фалшивите нови открития на някои от най-признатите и утвърдени имена в научния свят на нашето време.
5. Някои "лечения" на аутизъм.
6. Лоботомия.
7. Отровния газ.

Май станаха 7. Не ги представям хронологично, а и в книгата се прави връзка между тях понякога. Разказът е цялостен и компексен, не е така сегментиран, както изглежда в изброяване. Хареса ми, че са се опитали да разглеждат проблемите многостранно и обективно. Едно от главните послания е изводът "отровата е в дозата" - някои открития са полезни в едни сфери и в едни количества, а в други са се оказали смъртоносни. Историческите прегледи на научната работа са много важни, за да сверим компаса си и да погледенем в бъдещето, помнейки уроците. Друг извод, който много ми допадна е, че именити учени са правили грешни заключения, когато са се предоверявали на авторитета си. Смятали се за непогрешими. И били убедени, че правят нещо полезно за човечеството, или поне за нацията си. Повечето са били и носители на Нобел. Вечният урок в науката - не се доверявайте на авторитети, научния подход го изключва. Няма значение какво си правил преди, важни са само емпиричните данни. Урок, който спойно можем да вземем за себе си във всяка една сфера на живота.

Тази лаборатория на Пандора разказва за страдания, така че трябва да сте подготвени, но все пак е издание на National Geographic и нещата са с мярка. Няма излишни преувеличения и в този аспект е спазила собствената си препоръка, че лекарството (или отровата) е в дозата.

П.С. Сега като ги огледах, видях, че съм пропуснал частите за транс мазнините и за е-цигарите. Така стават повече от 7, защото темите са застъпени и групирани, може би с малка разлика от моето изброяване.

[Tucker Almengor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many thanks to Ann at National Geographic for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review

This was basically me throughout the book:


Pandora's Lab is (as the subtitle says) seven stories of science gone wrong or, as I put it, when explaining this book to friends, "Seven time science forked up"

It's kind of hard to review this book because it was nonfiction science. I always find nonfiction harder to review than fiction but I'll try.

If you enjoy anything National Geographic or History Channel, you'll love this book. It conveys fascinating stories of science and history in distinct and easily read chunks.

Also, I personally recommend the audiobook. It's narrated by Greg Tremblay, one of my favorite audio narrators.

Overall, this was fascinating, well written and easily read! Highly recommended.

------------

Fascinating! Review to come!

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here is a bonus gif of my trying the green liquid (water and sprinkles) from the picture above:


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[Mike (the Paladin) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book (as I've said often). While the "discoveries" and their uses being the 7 worst is of course subjective the facts are interesting.

The book would be a lot better if the writer could resist the political asides. He is obliviously "convinced" of his view(s) and manages to insult a goodly percentage of his readers. Just the way it is I guess.

The subject matter is (as I said) fairly interesting.

[Charlene · Rating 3 out of 5]

​With the opioid crisis looming large in the Press, it is the perfect time to read Pandoras Lab because the first chapter highlights what the ancient Sumerians called "hugil," meaning, "plant of joy." Offit traced the discovery and use of the poppy seed back to 4000BCE and followed its trajectory until the present day. Who could believe that inside that tiny poppy seed, there are no less than 5 potent drugs, waiting to be harvested? So much offering from one tiny seed. Inside that seed is a gum-like substance that holds the molecules that make up morphine, codeine, 2 muscle relaxants, and heroin. That tiny seed holds within it the power to heal and the power to kill. So powerful is the poppy, it can take away the pain created by cancer and other cruel diseases of life that ravage the body from the inside. I have nightmares about traveling back in time, knowing there was so little anyone could do to help people who had painful cancers, broken bones, gashes, and surgeries of various sorts. I am so happy to be alive today instead of back then, and back then wasn't even that long ago. ​Just a few decades ago, the founder of Hospice​ had to fight to make it legal to administer opioids to patients suffering unimaginable pain at the last and most cruel stages of their illnesses (it was neither legal to allow them to die, even as they begged) or to take away the pain they constantly had to endure. That is the most immoral thing I have ever heard, which always makes it so shocking to me when people make moral arguments for keeping a suffering person alive, while they have no problem allowing their beloved family pet, who is in terrible pain, to die in a peaceful and dignified way.

Offit certainly extols the virtues of this wonder drug. But, as powerful as it is at taking away pain, that little poppy seed has the power to kill as well. A significant number of people die from heroin overdoses each year. D​iag​o​ra​s of Melas has been trying to warn humanity about the addictive properties of opioids since the days of the ancient Greeks. Many still ignore him today. Opioids were already a problem for Americans who took in liquid form. It became a much larger problem during the gold rush, when Chinese people came over to join in the gold rush and brought with them their opium pipes. At that point opium became a health crisis and was made illegal. The fight has been going ever since. The opioid chapter was, by far, my favorite chapter. The other subjects were not as captivating, but I mostly enjoyed the point Offit was trying to get across to readers.


The goal of the book was to make the point that it is important to think critically. To create his argument, he examined the double edge sword of many advances, shining a light on the negative consequences of those advances. For example, Rachel Carson had a huge impact on making society aware of environmental concerns. Offit focused on how the reaction to her landmark book Silent Spring negatively affected the lives of people in Africa who likely died from malaria as a result of the banning of DDT. He warned against fear mongering of groups, citing some of what Trump has said about Mexicans and Muslims, and reminded us of what happened in the past when humans began singling out groups as unfit to be around the rest of society. They singled out "imbeciles" and forced sterilization upon them, starting what would become an every growing eugenics movement. Once you open the door to eugenics, with seemingly reasonable arguments, it is easier and easier to add requirements of these groups and more and more justifications of why it's ok to practice eugenics. He traced the concerns of imbeciles through to concerns of Jewish people in Nazi Germany. This chapter was difficult to read because it listed the horrific experiments done to 1000s of Jewish children, very few of whom survived. Related to the practices of the Nazi's, Offit wrote about Fritz Haber's scientific discovery of fixing nitrogen that allowed about 3 billion more people to be alive on this planet. However, Haber, a Jew himself, worked hard to help the Germans try to win world domination. He developed chemical weapons that were considered inhumane and seemed to have no moral qualms about using them.

It was interesting to think about how easy it was for people to force "imbeciles" (those with an IQ of less than 70 and those who increasingly were deemed unfit, for a a number of reasons, to have offspring, and then it was fashionable to turn perfectly intelligent people into imbeciles by way of giving them ever more efficient lobotomies. He gave a great summary of what happened to poor Rosemary Kennedy, who was cruelly tricked into getting a lobotomy. It was not simply kept from her; it was kept from her poor mother as well. Joe Kennedy took matters into his own hands, using very poor critical thinking skills, and ruined his daughter's life.

​Offit also tackled perceptions surrounding GMOs and BPA. Offits main point with all of these examples was to stress the message that, in order to accept any scientific study, you must, must, must make sure the results have been replicated. It's not enough to witness a phenomenon once, even if it has been published in a scientific journal. If it can't be replicated, it should never be accepted and spread through the general public as fact. He marveled, as do I, at how some people can focus on an extreme example and make that example the rule. For instance, the live polio vaccine did have a chance of giving a child polio but the chances of that were so much lower than getting polio if not for the vaccine. He, as always, had some truly great points to make about the anti-vaxx crowd. He debunked the BPA studies. I have to confess, I was very swayed by the animal studies I read about and have a hard time letting go of the BPA studies, even after reading this book. I will have to educate myself more about BPA studies in which rats were given food instead of injections, because those studies did not show negative effects of BPA. I am stunned. He suggested that BPA would have to be present at much higher levels (rats were injected with huge doses of BPA) in order to see demethylation of chromatin. I liked somethings in this book and didn't like others, but his last chapter or two was outstanding. He excels in pointing out where society fails in its critical thinking ability and always makes great points about the consequences of that lack of critical thinking. He seems particularly bothered, as am I now that I am aware, that parents of autistic kids are seeking "cures" from gurus instead of actual doctors and forcing their kids to swallow bleach as well as giving enemas of bleach. Apparently parents talk freely online about the suffering their children are going through, and other parents continue to support this harsh treatment, because they are sure it is worth it and sure it is working. These parents belong in jail, not surfing the net. Stupidity is fine as long as you are not ruining someone else's life because of it. If you have any say in policy or the raising of a child, you should work harder to become educated.

[Viola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zinātniskie atklājumi ir cilvēces attīstības stūrakmens, tomēr arī starp tiem ir tādi, bez kuriem varēja iztikt. Interesanti, ka tādas medicīniskas procedūras kā lobotomija, kas mūsdienās ir uzskatāma par barbarisku un bieži tiek pieminēta ķesku filmās, izgudrotājs saņēma Nobela prēmiju. Grāmatā minēti arī tādi atklājumi kā sinepju gāze,margarīns, pesticīdi utt. Kopumā interesanta lasāmviela, iesaku.

[Austra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Izklaidējoša un izglītojoša izlase ar izgudrojumiem, kas tika radīti ar labu domu, bet beidzās viss krietni sliktāk. Kā bailes no sviestiņa un pesticīdiem ir radījušas citas, lielākas problēmas, kur aug kājas Trampa retorikai, kādas kaites skar Nobela laureātus, kā neārstēt autismu un kāpēc lobotomija tomēr nav ģeniāls izgudrojums. Tas viss un vēl. Rekomendējama lasāmviela. Tāpat kā rekomendējama ir kritiska pieeja informācijas avotiem un veselā saprāta izmantošana, cik nu tas iespējams.

[BAM doesn’t answer to her real name · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tree huggers, people against vaccinations, vegetarians, etc don’t read this book you’ll just get pissed off and kick a puppy

[Sebastian Gebski · Rating 5 out of 5]

A big surprise.
I didn't expect much and I got the best book I've read for at least 6 months (which is a lot in my case).
Why is it so good?

1. All stories are interested and very well picked. If you expect all of them to be similar (something was invented, people didn't know it was harmful but they've finally figured it out), you will be pleasantly surprised.
2. There are literally tons of facts, no building drama, just raw info - the final effect was as gripping as the best fiction action novels
3. There are still clear lessons in these stories, some of them more and some of them less obvious. But all of them are worth your attention, very thought-provoking: because all those atrocities have actually happened.

I can honestly recommend this book to everyone, especially people interested in social science, behavioral psychology. On a 0 to 5 stars scale, I rate it an honest 7 :)

[Nancy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I listened to this on audio. After only I few minutes, I realized the author has a political agenda. I don't care what an author's political stance is, but unless I am reading a political book, I don't want politics sneakily integrated in. I should have done more research on the author before I read it...this was not at all what I had hoped for and I am very disappointed.

[Dov Zeller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating and disturbing book that covers a lot of scientists and science and non-science claiming itself to be science. I've read about some of the topics and people covered in here before in different contexts. But the way this book presents and frames these stories is intriguing, chilling and important. Scientists are driven by personal, cultural and political ideals and beliefs and also, sometimes, their desire to be right or to influence people and/or events is much more compelling to them than whether what they are doing is actually productive/helpful/beneficial/based in reality. There are pseudo-scientific 'fads' that do a lot of harm, and scientific studies done with the intention of promoting dangerous philosophies and products.

So, how can we value scientific discoveries that are illuminating and worth exploring further without allowing the exploitation of scientific ideas (some of them based in some grain of truth, some of them based in none at all) that harm some groups of people and benefit others? For examples, as information about genetics became more mainstream, non-scientific ideas about a "master race" and "pure genetics" were presented as science and benefitted white supremacists/nationalists/nazis in Germany the U.S. while allowing for horrific, unspeakable brutality and violence. We've not seen or heard the end of this fiasco. And poor science led to the promotion of certain supposedly healthy foods and supplements and benefitted the people selling these products while harming people who used them.

So, this book looks at seven harmful to horrific scenarios in which science is ill-used or not used at all but referred to in order to create false credibility. And in the end, the author asks, how can we learn from all this and do better in the future?

I am pretty cynical in the sense that I haven't seen evidence that we (humans in larger tribal, cultural and national groupings) learn from our mistakes in a way that helps us use technology and science for 'good'. And yet, I do think it is an important book and hope it's influential.

One thing that I found worrisome and upsetting, but also interesting in the sense of, even in this book it's possible the ideas held by the author are influenced by things outside of science and may be downright wrong--is a comment he made about chronic lyme on page 148 in the middle of the page. He makes what I can only read as a disparaging remark about people who "believe" they are suffering from "chronic lyme disease." I've been to doctors and have had a lot of sick friends who have been to doctors who scoff at the idea that lyme can go chronic or systemic. These doctors treat people with chronic lyme as if they are craazy. I have a hunch in not too many years, these doctors (Offit, it seems, being one of them) will be in the camp of scientists and medical practitioners who let their prejudices and self-interest get in the way of real science and real support of sick patients.

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a sobering read. This is Nonfiction about how things that seemed like a worthwhile idea went very wrong, often on a global level. This one made me sad, but I was riveted. Sad? Yes. But it was also kind of fascinating to learn of the history and progression of some of these ideas. Often things went unchecked while in the hands of the WRONG people. The unintended consequences were eye opening.

Unfortunately, we can't rewind and change things, but hopefully lessons were learned. So for this one, 4 riveting stars.

[Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pandora's Lab offers a fascinating and scary look at some of the most damaging scientific missteps in the past few centuries and how we can learn from them to do better in the future. It's very easy to read and while I had heard about some of these stories before I still found enough to keep me engaged. One thing that really stuck with me throughout this book is how much damage determined and misguided individuals can cause while facing zero repercussion for their actions apart from maybe being vilified after they have left this earth. It's also slightly odd to see how many of these people were awarded the Nobel Prize in their time.

[Zain Hashmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

1. My Gripes with the Content and The Author's Opinions:

Pandora's Lab fascinates you with the title, and under the guff and smoke, presents stories about the advancement of science, and the lessons that need to be learnt from the reckless pursuit of technology. At least, that is what the book claims in its first half. Lamenting on the discovery of a technology, and blaming the technology for the way it was used was something I took an immediate offense to from the very beginning. Show me a hammer, and I'll show you a murder weapon, show me fire and I'll show you an arsonist. Listing Mendel's discovery of genetics in the list of Science Gone Wrong was probably something that I took a personal offense to(because I'm a biotechnologist). Mendel's Theory of Heredity is listed here because Madison Grant wrote a pseudo-scientific treatise by drawing parallels with Mendel's work to create the theory of Nordic Races, which is the fount of all modern racism. Adolf Hitler proclaimed The Passing of The Great Races(Grant's book) to be his Bible and derived his own work Mein Kampf from it, and went on to murder innocent people.
In another chapter in the book, a celebrated chemist created artificial fertilizer, and then used that fertilizer during the war to create chemical weapons and explosives.
In both these cases, it is not the tool that is at fault, but the wielder. The writer initially claims that discovering a technology is like opening Pandora's box, because you never know what evils it might bring into the world, but a tool by it's very nature is innocent. The evils already exist in the world, right within us.
Aside from my gripe with the author on this issue, I can wholeheartedly agree with everything else in the book. It is incredibly informative and well researched, but in some cases accurate data has been slightly skewed to help the author's point of view, so I would advise readers to take this book with a pinch of salt.
Think critically, like the author encourages you to do, evaluate the facts, and trust only the data.
This book can be considered a warning to everyone who would bypass the scientific method and rely on gut instinct and anecdotal or sparse evidence to propagate their claims. That, I think, is the best description of what this book really is.

2. Writing Style

The book is written beautifully, and should be simple for any reader to follow, despite the fact that it deals with complex science. There is an art to writing a scientific book in a manner that does not oversimplify the science but does not clutter it with jargon either, and this book finds that balance beautifully. I enjoyed every bit of the storytelling, and the way the facts were presented, and I would recommend this book to everyone I can. The book even highlights in many places the logic traps that we fall into while looking at stories and data, and cautions us on how to avoid them.

3. Summary:

Read it. Short, informative, accurate.

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the story about unintended consequences, and unleashing discoveries on the world without enough testing beforehand. The frontal lobotomy, trans fats, eugenics, the synthesis of ammonium nitrate, megavitamins, opioids, and the banning of DDT are the seven that Offit has selected as big mistakes. Some, like lobotomies and trans fats, were a horrible idea from the start. Others, like ammonium nitrate and opioids, have been used indiscriminately and created problems.

Offit gives a good history of each of these problems, from the discovery of the thing to today’s results. He gives a bibliography to back up his thesis, and the last chapter is a warning: how to learn from the past, and how to identify bad science. The book is well researched and well written, and is interesting from beginning to end.

Do I agree with everything he says? Well, no. While I agree that deaths from overdoses of opioids are a bad thing, I certainly don’t want them not used any more. Too many people with chronic pain rely on them to get up and do a day’s work; for acute pain, as in post-surgery use, there is nothing else like them. A way needs to be found to keep them from being *over* used, rather than banning them. Yes, banning DDT meant that a number of mosquito borne diseases, which had become scarce in some area, came back with a vengeance, but I don’t agree with him that no damage was ever done with DDT. We need to find a better way, such as vaccines, to deal with those diseases, not bring back a substance that is still in every single person in the world. I do love his lessons on identifying bad science; if something seems to be the answer to all kinds of questions, it’s probably bogus. Nothing cures everything. Nothing cures without the possibility of side effects. As Heinlein said, there ain’t no such thing as free lunch.