In U.S., science is distorted to promote political and corporate agendas

[Guest guest]

NewsTarget.com

Originally published September 7 2007

http://www.newstarget.com/022019.html

In U.S., science is distorted to promote political and corporate agendas

by Mike Adams

 

In the United States today, science is no longer a pure study. The science

primarily publicized today is science that supports the interest of

business. You see this in many areas, but most notably in medical and

environmental science. Let's start with the environment, because the

censorship of environmental science has been blatant and extreme.

 

Under the Bush Administration, government-employed scientists are routinely

told they cannot report results indicating the progression of global

warming. The United States is the last among industrialized nations to claim

that carbon dioxide emissions produced by human civilization have no impact

whatsoever on the world climate. This is an utterly ridiculous position, and

yet one that U.S. policymakers insist upon. These policymakers go out of

their way to censor scientists whose data and conclusions might run counter

to the desired belief.

 

The United States is the only advanced nation that refuses to ratify the

Kyoto treaty, and, to support its justification, the U.S. government has for

a long time insisted there's no such thing as global warming. To make that

claim, it must distort science. The science clearly shows that human

civilization is having a marked and destructive impact on the global

ecosystem.

 

Medicine is another field where so-called science stops resembling science.

Instead, it becomes propaganda designed to sell drugs. The clinical trials

used by the Food and Drug Administration to make drug approval decisions are

conducted almost entirely by the drug companies themselves. These companies

go out of their way to hire scientists willing to design and run these

studies to produces precisely the result that the drug companies want. This

is easy to accomplish; any researcher refusing to play along with this

fraudulent science game is not offered additional work. In the worst cases,

they are terminated and blackballed from the industry.

 

This manipulation of drug trials is routine today. Drug companies are able

to support almost any conclusion, no matter how ridiculous or preposterous,

by pumping enough money into the studies. They can then picking the studies

they want to forward to the FDA and make sure that on-the-take researchers

are involved at every stage of the game. The FDA then bases its drug

approvals on these junk science manipulations.

 

 

Junk science and the discrediting of alternative medicine

While distorted science is used to promote synthetic chemicals that are

extremely dangerous and almost universally ineffective, the same sort of

distortion is used to attack anything that could compete with high-profit

pharmaceuticals. Bad science is used to attack vitamins, nutrients, and all

natural therapies that powerful corporations can't patent to make real

money.

 

Vitamin E was routinely discredited in the mainstream media, for example,

using remarkably bad science. Researchers tested synthetic, low-dose

versions of vitamin E on populations with high risks of heart attack or

stroke. When deaths occurred within the sample population group, the

headlines read, " Vitamin E causes Heart Attack! " It's a preposterous

conclusion; but this is how deeply distorted science has become today in its

quest to promote the interests of corporations. (In truth, researchers

weren't even using vitamin E, they were using a synthetic chemical with a

molecular structure that isn't the same as vitamin E from plants.)

 

Residents of the United States like to think they live in a nation based on

solid science. Although there is plenty of rigorous science taking place

within the United States, much of the most important science produced today

is based entirely on creating the illusion that something sold by a

corporation is good, or that new regulations that require businesses to

conduct themselves with environmental responsibility are not necessary. It's

interesting that science always seems to reflect the interests of

corporations here in the United States, and rarely the interests of the

People, the planet or the future of human civilization.

 

 

Consider NASA

How good is science in the United States? Let's take a look at one of the

most prestigious scientific organizations, the National Aeronautics Space

Administration, better known as NASA. NASA's science is so bad that the

organization spent $300 million to launch -- and crash -- a satellite into

planet Mars. One of the scientists failed to convert the metric system to

the English system, and as a result, some of the navigation computations

were off and $300 million went up in a cloud of red Martian dust.

 

Last year, NASA deleted the phrase, " to understand and protect our home

planet " from the NASA mission statement. Apparently, protecting Earth is not

high on the priorities list for an agency that has become the Science

Mythology Department of the United States government. Ever since Bush

appointed NASA administrator Michael Griffin to the head post in 2005,

NASA's scientific reputation has nosedived into the ground faster than a

poorly programmed Mars orbiter. The question on everybody's mind is, simply:

What the heck happened to NASA? And why is the agency's top bureaucrat now

officially denying that global warming is a problem?

 

It's true: In a recorded interview that aired on National Public Radio a few

weeks ago, NASA head Michael Griffin actually said, on the air, that it was

arrogant and unfair to believe that global warming was a problem that needed

solving. This left all the other NASA scientists gasping for air and e-mail

blasting their resumes out to private-sector institutions that still

remember what " scientific thinking " really means.

 

NASA is also the organization that launched the twin robot rovers to Mars,

also at a cost of several hundred million dollars. Before the launch, NASA

didn't bother to test the robots to see if they could take pictures without

overloading their memory and constantly rebooting. NASA scientists

apparently decided they would only start debugging the software that

controls the Mars Rover after the robot was on the surface of Mars. It was a

laughable mistake. By some miracle, NASA scientists were able to make the

rovers work, but only at great expense and while running the risk of total

mission failure.

 

NASA was a great organization back in the 1960s and pulled off some amazing

feats, but today it's a joke; a bloated bureaucratic agency whose only skill

seems to be burning up taxpayer dollars in the high atmospheres of various

planets. I'm not saying rocket science is easy, but at least NASA could

bother to test its equipment before rocketing it off to distant planets.

 

 

The (fake) search for a cure

When it comes to cancer, the " search for the cure " is also a sad joke. We've

had tens of thousands of people working on a cure for cancer for decades.

The " search for the cure " industry is absolutely huge, and yet with all the

scientists and all the money and all the research, we still have no cure

from the world of medicine. Not only that, they have delivered no cures for

Alzheimer's, diabetes, depression, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome,

heart disease, strokes, dementia, osteoporosis, or kidney disease. In fact,

after decades of research and tens of billions of dollars in funding,

conventional medicine has cured nothing!

 

What have the scientists been doing all this time with all this money?

Members of the public are running around in circles raising money, funding

the " race for the cure, " dumping their hard-earned cash into a huge

financial black hole of so-called research. We're standing by waiting for

cures from a scientific community that, it turns out, isn't even interested

in curing disease. The industry is far more interested in treating and

managing disease, because that's where the profits are found.

 

If the US medical research companies were interested in real science, they

would stop trying to research the disease and start trying to research the

causes of the disease. If you identify the causes of cancers -- which is

quite possible without a $100 million government grant -- then you can halt

the diseases. At least 90 percent of all cancers are directly preventable,

for example, through simple low-cost or free solutions. There is no need for

cancer to be an epidemic in our society today. Cancer is easy to prevent.

Recent research shows that vitamin D supplements (or sunlight exposure,

which produces vitamin D), slash cancer risk by an astonishing 77% in women

(and that includes ALL cancers).

 

There will never be a chemical cure for cancer, because cancer is not a

disease based on germs, an infection, parasite or virus. There is no

chemical that can cure cancer, but there are many natural remedies and

prevention strategies that very effectively eliminate cancer. Scientists

aren't looking for those, however. They're steeped in the world of synthetic

chemical medicine.

 

 

Where has the real science gone?

These are just a few examples of the ways in which America's version of

science is failing. Science today seems largely dedicated to conning people

out of their money or conning people into believing falsehoods about health

or the environment. Junk science has become the tool of corporate and

government con artists, and sadly, the public isn't educated well enough

about skeptical thinking to know the difference between real science and

junk science. For example, few people understand the difference between

absolute vs. relative statistics on the efficacy of drugs, and because of

that, drug companies are able to convince people their drugs are effective

for nearly everyone when, in reality, many drugs only work on about 5% of

the population.

 

Science needs to divorce itself from business interests and politics. If we

are to engage in real science in America, it needs to be based on the quest

for knowledge and understanding, independent of business or political

interests. We should not predetermine what scientific outcomes we wish to

see; we should learn to adapt and evolve as a civilization, allowing science

to teach us important things about ourselves and our world.

 

Because science without ethics isn't science at all... it's just propaganda

for either profit or power.

 

 

 

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